


said like laughter

by rauchblau



Series: the long light [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: (occasionally botched) attempts at healthy communication, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Awkward Flirting, Boggarts, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Getting Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, boys talking about feelings, fix it of sorts for some of the wizarding world's issues by means of haikyuu, hanamaki and matsukawa continue to be the worst best friends ever, head boy iwaizumi hajime, seijou third years, uhh pining i guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25492243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rauchblau/pseuds/rauchblau
Summary: Hajime can’t do boggarts. Oikawa makes it his mission to fix that. Absolutely no one is amused.
Relationships: Hanamaki Takahiro & Iwaizumi Hajime & Matsukawa Issei & Oikawa Tooru, Iwaizumi Hajime & Michimiya Yui, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: the long light [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/623348
Comments: 53
Kudos: 73





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swishy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swishy/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (would you believe that i took the opening sentence of a oneshot and turned it into a 35-40k sequel? because i still can't)
> 
> This is set after ['speak each other in passing'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9200531) and ['call me friend (but keep me closer)'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23369395).

For the second time in the past hour, Matsukawa collapses on the library table, slumping face-first into the debris of open books, discarded drafts, and not-so-secret study snacks that litter its surface - only this time, he splinters his quill and upends his ink-pot in the process. Oikawa shrieks and snatches up his 3-foot-something Potions essay, trailing one corner of it through the spill and sending at least four biros clattering to the ground. Over the noise of several shushes from surrounding tables, Hajime heaves a long-suffering sigh.

‘For god’s sake, Hanamaki’, he hisses and hastily vanishes the ink before it stains the Sheehan Standard Handbook of Transfiguration and Anatomy, 14th edition, that they’ve been waiting weeks to get their hands on.

Across the table, Hanamaki, himself sporting a bloody nose from a stunner taken to the face a scant ten minutes ago, winks and blows out a double finger gun.

‘That’s enough for today’, Hajime orders in a low voice, scowling ineffectively at the chair-scrape of Oikawa diving under the table to recollect his pens. ‘Weak stunners or no, taking one repeatedly is bound to do some kind of damage.’

‘Any battle wounds sustained in the noble practice of wandless, non-verbal magic are wounds of honour’, Hanamaki declares grandly, with no apparent regard for volume.

Someone shushes them again, more sharply this time. Oikawa, re-emerging with a fistful of biros, throws a Muffliato around their group before fixing Hanamaki with a sullen look. ‘Nothing involving finger guns is even remotely noble, Makki.’

‘Do I detect a hint of jealousy there, oh my Grand King?’

Oikawa immediately deflates, flopping his entire upper body over his homework in a mirror image of the still-stunned Matsukawa, words muffled in the crook of his arm. ‘I had to tutor you in Charms all through third year. How come you can do something this painfully cool now? You can’t become cooler than me!’

‘Literally everyone around this table is cooler than you, and it doesn’t even take a lot of effort’, Hajime says off-handedly, mostly focused on rooting around for his wand, which he last used to mark a page in a book that’s now lying, _sans_ wand and open on a completely different page, on Oikawa’s side of the table. Hanamaki pats Oikawa’s shoulder in a show of agreement and consolation.

‘Cruel, Iwa-chan’, Oikawa starts with his usual artificial whine. The last syllable breaks into a genuine squeak when Hanamaki moves on to ruffle his hair.

‘That’s me.’ Over the ensuing scuffle at the other side of the table, Hajime finally locates his wand under several unrelated sheets of notes and points it at Matsukawa. ‘Ennervate.’

Matsukawa slowly picks himself up, blinking owlishly and rubbing his face. The quill has given him a scratch on one cheek that’s oozing a little blood, now smeared from the rubbing, but he’s grinning.

‘Nice one, Hiro!’

They high-five.

At the fringes of Hajime’s vision, several students are glaring at them. He quickly casts another Muffliato, just to be on the safe side; but before he can tell the two idiots to use their bloody library voices, for fuck’s sake, Oikawa’s knee bumps against his under the table. Abruptly diverted, Hajime’s scowl shatters.

‘Mattsun, you should let Iwa-chan heal your face,’ Oikawa interjects smoothly. He’s back upright, occupied with trying to fix his hair and not even looking at Hajime. He has green ink on his chin from the tip of one of his biros, and at the back of his head one bit of hair is sticking up that his hands keep missing. ‘That look is much less rakish than you probably think.’

Matsukawa presses a hand to his chest in mock-hurt, but obediently turns his injured cheek towards Hajime and allows him to carefully knit the skin back together until only a thin pink line remains.

‘Honestly’, Oikawa continues on in the background, ‘I’m all for practising more than just theory and I really don’t think that classroom time is enough for proper N.E.W.T. preparation, as we all know, but can we maybe do this in an appropriately dodgy disused classroom where I’m not trying to finish four feet on how the composite metals of a cauldron affect enhancement potions?’

‘N.E.W.T. prep’, scoffs Hanamaki. ‘This is for a far higher purpose. Duelling club!’

‘How endearingly short-sighted of you’, Oikawa quips. ‘Now shush. Oikawa-san needs to think about composite metals.’

Hanamaki pulls a face at his studiously bowed head, but settles down.

‘You know what’, Hajime muses quietly over Oikawa’s renewed scribbling, ‘that’s actually not a terrible idea. We could get some of the others to come as well – Bokuto’s, well, anything is great practice for shield charms, and Sugawara does a mean Impedimenta that he keeps saying is about a variation of wrist movement…’

Matsukawa apparently gives up trying to repair his quill, swiping one of Oikawa’s pens to twirl between his fingers instead. ‘That’s all well and good, but I’m more concerned with whatever weird creatures they’re gonna dump on us. Not like we can get much banshee practice in that easily.’

‘As long as it’s not a bloody boggart again’, Hajime says with feeling. ‘I could really do with not failing my Defence N.E.W.T.s because of a third-year exercise.’

To his right, Oikawa’s pen hand stills. Hajime immediately regrets the slip-up. They have eight weeks left until the exams, six weeks until the Hufflepuff match, and Oikawa is tense enough as is. He’s hardly finished that thought when Hanamaki, frowning at his own essay and oblivious to Oikawa’s attention, delivers the final blow in an absent mutter, barely audible over the scratch of a vigorous strike-through.

‘I still think you should be exempt from those.’

Oikawa’s eyes dart between the three of them for a moment.

‘What’s this? You can’t do boggarts, Iwa-chan?’

His expression and tone are of smooth, abstract curiosity. Shame sits sour in the pit of Hajime’s stomach. Just like that, he feels fifteen again, angry at both himself and, irrationally, at Oikawa, and simultaneously seventeen and very tired. It’s strange how some things can have the power stripped from them with painstaking work and yet, at a single question, come back fresh and bruising.

Hanamaki winces. Matsukawa grimaces sympathetically.

‘It’s no big deal’, Hajime mumbles uselessly, eyes averted. He could just as well have kept silent or told Oikawa to fuck off, as far as effectively diffusing the situation goes.

Oikawa chews on his lower lip, staring at him pensively. When he speaks, his voice is light. ‘You don’t have to look so worried, Iwa-chan. It’s called “nastily exhausting” for a reason, you know, so I don’t think you’ll be dealt something as plebeian as a boggart.’

He reaches across the table and taps Hajime’s chest with his pen. ‘So even though you can’t do third-year exercises, you might have a chance at actually passing.’

Rationally, Hajime knows that this is Oikawa’s hurt speaking, and that it’s justified, or at least understandable. He has imagined this conversation way too many times over the past two years, in the stifling silence of his bed with all the curtains drawn, or even just in flashes of what-ifs when a topic incidentally strayed close enough. He’s never been satisfied with how it played out in his head, and the longer he dragged his feet, the more difficult it became to start. He definitely never wanted to start at a library table, even one sheltered by two Muffliatos and the quiet disdain of the surrounding students. So rationally, he knows. Still the anger rushes out from the impact point of Oikawa’s patronising little pen tap, the point where the tip of his pen _is still sitting_ , but before it can actually crest and break, Matsukawa cuts in.

‘Shut up, Oikawa’, he says, so uncharacteristically sharp that Oikawa blinks in surprise and pulls his pen back to himself without another word. ‘Iwaizumi, if you do want to practice at any point, let me know. I’m pretty sure Kyoutani can find one for us.’

‘Yeah, thanks’, Hajime mutters automatically. The anger is gone as suddenly as it appeared, unresolved, and now he just feels hollow and tired.

Dust motes hang suspended in the column of weak sunlight slanting in from the closest window. After an uncomfortable beat, the scratch of Hanamaki’s quill slowly picks back up, and Hajime looks down at his own potions essay. It’s not even a foot long so far, and he was supposed to get some History revision in before dinner, too. Oikawa’s gaze is heavy. Half-spoken words keep swimming up, explanations turned accusations turned apologies. Even when Oikawa finally turns away, Hajime is still oddly aware of the space between them, the give-or-take two feet and the corner of the table with its generations of scratched-in student names, but mostly of the empty space between their legs and arms and shoulders that is suddenly almost corporeal.

It feels acutely wrong. Oikawa holds his pen gingerly; his other hand is deliberately splayed out on the table, each finger stretched like he’s maximising contact. Seeing him like that, Hajime usually wants to punch someone. It’s not usually himself. He wants to reach out, cover those five solitary fingers, slip his own in the spaces between.

He puts his quill down with a resolute exhale.

Oikawa’s head jerks up from his poorly feigned focus.

‘Alright. Let’s go talk about it.’

He pushes back his chair and stands. Oikawa scrambles to his feet, too, like he’s dragged up by Hajime’s movement alone. When Hajime turns on his heel and makes for the exit, he knows Oikawa will follow.

He walks quickly and mutely until they’re outside and past the greenhouses, down where the grounds slope towards the lake. The early spring sun is just about strong enough that if he stands motionless, it will be warm. He feels his shoulders settle a little, broadening out. Oikawa notices too, probably, because a breath later he catches up, his own shoulder brushing Hajime’s for a step before they come to a halt, in the middle of nowhere, in full sunlight.

Hajime studies the grass at their feet, pale and winter-worn, the startling green of the first few new blades peeking through in places. When Oikawa speaks up first, he’s so surprised that he flinches.

‘I’m sorry’, Oikawa is saying. ‘I think?’

Hajime’s exhale comes in a rush, like there was more breath than anticipated. He finds that he wants to be closer to the ground, or maybe just closer to the rest of his body, so he sits down, with his legs crossed and his hands skimming just above the grass. The ground is cool; his robes will get damp if he stays like this. Oikawa settles down next to him, a careful distance between their knees, and keeps looking at him, and waits, while Hajime’s hands skim over the grass and the spring sun is warm on his shoulders and he tries to subtly unclench his jaw. After a bit of that, and of Oikawa just watching, breathing becomes a little easier.

‘Not your fault’, he says finally. His voice is almost normal. ‘I never told you.’

‘Okay’, says Oikawa, with the tiniest uptick at the end of the word, just so that it’s not an outright question but can still mean _go on_.

Hajime does.

‘It really isn’t that big of a deal. I got a boggart first thing in my Defence O.W.L. exam, guess they were trying to, I don’t know, ease into the exam situation, but I really fucked up, or it really fucked me up, or whatever– and I couldn’t deal with it to the point where _they_ had to deal with it and then give me a time-out to calm down.’

For all the time he has spent not talking to Oikawa about this, it sure is difficult now to find a good place to make a sentence stop.

Oikawa doesn’t say anything, just keeps looking at him.

‘After that, they basically gave me a do-over with a grindylow as a warm-up exercise, and I haven’t seen a boggart since. So it’s… weird, I guess, to think that there might be one in the N.E.W.T.s.’

Oikawa gives a small hum. He’s wearing his thinking face – not the one he puts on in class sometimes, with the scrunched-up forehead and pensive index finger curled over his lips, but the serious one, slack-jawed and unselfconsciously blank.

‘Iwa-chan’, he says, firm and gentle like Hajime might break, or bolt, and Hajime honestly isn’t sure whether he might not just do one of these things, but Oikawa is looking so steady, so he might just hold on for a little more. ‘What did the boggart turn into?’

Hajime huffs something like a laugh, except it comes out all wrong.

‘You.’

‘Ah’, says Oikawa, softly. He doesn’t balk, or grimace, or complain. He just looks like he understands, and Hajime, who has been expecting noisy demands for explanation, feels a twinge, painful and comfortable, where the anger has been.

Oikawa doesn’t move, but it looks like he wants to.

‘Can I?’, he asks instead.

Hajime nods, and Oikawa pulls him into a hug. It’s not a good hug, objectively speaking. He’s still sitting cross-legged and leaning awkwardly to the side; one of Oikawa’s knees is digging into his hip bone, his shoulder pressing into Oikawa’s chest. But Oikawa holds on like he doesn’t care, he’s warm and firm and his breath is warm too on the back of Hajime’s head, and a slow and regular rise-and-fall against his shoulder. Like this, it’s very noticeable that Oikawa has a few centimetres on him. Hajime can easily lean his head against Oikawa’s shoulder and let his eyes fall shut.

So he does.

Eventually, Oikawa winces and shifts, sitting up.

‘Sorry’, he murmurs, closer than before, and then, with an embarrassed little laugh: ‘knee.’

Hajime can’t help it. He snorts. Oikawa looks startled, but cautiously settles next to him with both his knees drawn up to his chin and his hands locked tidily around them. His shin rests heavy against Hajime’s thigh.

‘I was still in St. Mungo’s when you took your O.W.L.s’, he says. There’s only a hint of paper in his voice, and he’s shedding it as the sentence progresses. He’s keeping his eyes forward, on the distance, the lake perhaps, or the fringe of forest behind.

Hajime hums an affirmative.

‘I never really apologized to you for that.’

‘You broke two vertebrae and gave yourself an artificial knee.’

This part never not sounds like an accusation, even when it’s supposed to be an appeasement. At least Hajime thinks, or hopes, that’s what it was supposed to be.

Oikawa just takes it. ‘I did’, he says, and when he turns his face is stripped of all pretence. He looks older like that, pained and uncertain and at the same time so sure. ‘I’m sorry you had to see that. And take care of me. And deal with the fallout.’

It doesn’t really matter that he said it, and at the same time, curiously, it does. Hajime owes him the same, but he can’t think of what to say. Another thing that never worked out quite right in these pointless mental run-throughs. He remembers asking what happened and remembers Oikawa’s face over his hospital gown, the greens and yellows and violets of life pooling in the hollows of skin under the fluorescent lights; remembers Oikawa’s face, closed off. He shifts, opens space between them before Oikawa can.

‘Do you remember–’ His voice doesn’t quite fit in his throat. He spreads his hand out against the grass on the side where Oikawa is not sitting. Bends the blades to the ground and lets them spring up again.

He tries again, differently. ‘I’m sorry too. For not being there.’

Oikawa turns his face towards the greenhouses, like Hajime doesn’t know what the line of his shoulder and neck and cheek looks like when he’s biting back tears. His hands curl into each other. The space between them is briefly insurmountable.

Then, still looking away, he exhales.

‘I’m glad you weren’t, I think.’

This way around, it’s familiar, easy now to lean back in, collapse the space. Easy to reach out and brush two fingers through the unruly strand of hair still sticking up at the back of Oikawa’s head so that it falls in place, and then settle his hand on Oikawa’s shoulder, just below the collar and tie, and anchor them together. On the empty green, down towards the lake, a spring wind bends the tired grass, and a greenhouse door slams shut with the breeze.

‘I’m still sorry’, Hajime says.

‘Me too.’

They sit like that, Oikawa with his head tipped back towards the sky, his throat rising from the green and black of his robes like a new shoot, pale and miraculous, Hajime idly watching his pulse flutter under the skin, until a shout drifts over from the castle and Oikawa stirs. His eyes are dry and there’s a twist to his mouth, self-ironically displeased.

‘Gross. Everything is cold and wet. And we should probably get back to the library, anyway. Iwa-chan still needs to write three more feet before dinner.’ When he stretches his fingers, he lets one hand brush Hajime’s thigh.

Whether it’s in thanks or reassurance, Hajime doesn’t know; but Oikawa doesn’t touch without intent. He feels heavy with relief, a slow rolling thing.

‘Worry about yourself’, he says mildly, getting to his feet. His robes are wet, too, and probably muddy, and half his ass has fallen asleep. ‘I know exactly why Pepper-Up does better with a copper cauldron than most other invigorating draughts, and the argument for that alone will be enough, easily.’

He plants his feet more firmly and holds out a hand, and Oikawa takes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to sue Ezra Pound for setting unnecessarily high standards for skin/plant metaphors, who’s with me
> 
> If you're not super familiar with the Harry Potter universe, I've done a little bit of background exposition [here](https://rauchblauwrites.tumblr.com/post/624706837025095680/i-found-the-latest-update-to-be-a-bit-confusing).
> 
> (credit for the incredible double-finger-guns-and-a-wink move for wandless magic goes to [this tumblr post](https://accio.tumblr.com/post/141140197964/really-advanced-wizards-can-cast-wandless-spells) by @accio)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘If this was a lurid romance novel, this would be the part where we start making out.’ 
> 
> Or: Oikawa tries to help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that this chapter has mentions and a brief description of character death, even though of course no one actually dies.

‘Iwa-chan’, Oikawa trills, three days later, worming his way onto the bench between Hajime and Matsukawa and jostling Hajime’s glass of pumpkin juice in the process. ‘Good morning! I found you a boggart!’

Hajime promptly loses all appetite for his buttered porridge. The two first-years on the other side of the table are shooting them worried glances from behind an enormous dish of scrambled eggs. Next to them, Hanamaki stops feverishly leafing through his Transfiguration textbook.

The entire length of Oikawa’s body is pressed against his own. He’s come straight from the shower; there’s the slightest bit of damp warmth and colour still clinging to his skin and Hajime gets a good lungful of his sweet coconut and jasmine shampoo. His face is clear and open in anticipation, projecting nothing but absolute conviction and goodwill. He knows Hajime well enough, then, to expect resistance.

And Hajime is not about to disappoint him. He puts his spoon down neatly next to his bowl, a slow movement. Dragging out the moment, building suspense. When he turns his head, scowl firmly in place, Oikawa is so close that their noses almost brush.

‘You what?’ With his voice pitched low like this, he can make even Kyoutani cower. Maybe, potentially, one of the first-years across the table gives a hastily muffled squeak. Oikawa, unfortunately, doesn’t turn a hair. Whatever flashes briefly in his eyes is definitely not fear.

‘I found a boggart, for you, to practice with’, he repeats slowly, like he’s speaking to a child. He’s not blinking. For a while, when they were seven or so, this had been Oikawa’s idea of a secret language – instead of whispering, he would say things at normal volume, but with exaggerated levels of eye contact and no blinking at all, insisting that this ‘meaningful look’ meant that ‘nobody else will understand it’s a secret, only you’. Even then, it hadn’t been a very good tactic.

‘You trying to romance him into accepting your weird gift?’, Hanamaki enquires from across the table, between two sizeable bites of toast.

With some effort, Hajime ignores him. To his surprise, Oikawa does, too. He is still close enough that Hajime can see every individual eyelash, and he’s still not blinking.

‘I think I missed the part where we agreed that you’d become my therapist’, Hajime says through his teeth.

‘Don’t be obstinate, Iwa-chan’, Oikawa returns briskly, finally giving his eyes a rest. ‘It’s a great opportunity to put this behind you _and_ to not fail your N.E.W.T.s. Two birds with one stone! I’ll even promise to help you.’

Matsukawa grimaces, looking like his bite of sausage is slightly too big for his mouth. ‘Oikawa…’

Hajime puts out a hand to stop him without looking away from Oikawa’s eyes. They’re still round with a puppy-like eagerness. Sometimes it’s a bit of a mystery to him how Oikawa can be so good at reading people, and simultaneously so bad at knowing when to let something go, but then letting go of things has never been Oikawa’s forte.

‘It’s fine’, he says. ‘I can handle him. Thanks though.’

‘Hello? I’m right here! It’s rude to talk over me’, Oikawa complains, waving his hand in Hajime’s face. Hajime grabs it before he can knock over the coffee or something, and returns it firmly to a bit of the tabletop that’s in Oikawa’s space.

‘Stop it. Look, I appreciate that you want to help, but you can’t just barrel all over me in the process.’

Oikawa gives him a hard look. Whatever he reads in Hajime’s face seems to convince him, because he wilts slightly. ‘I just thought it might be helpful.’

Hajime considers this over the crunching of Hanamaki’s final bite of toast. The thing is, he’s probably right – it could be actually helpful. If Matsukawa and Hanamaki had offered, or even just if Oikawa had gone about it like a normal person, he wouldn’t have thought twice about saying yes, and maybe even thank you.

Oikawa is still sitting with his head bowed, eyes cast firmly downward. Over his shoulder, Hajime looks to the other two for a second opinion.

Matsukawa gives a slight shrug and a small wry twist of his lips that says, _why not_? On the other side of the table, Hanamaki nods. The two first-years look riveted behind their scrambled eggs. Hajime guesses he can’t very well disappoint them.

‘Fine’, he grouses.

Oikawa whips his head up, flushed and beaming. ‘Oh, Iwa-chan, really? I did work hard on finding it, you know, I even went and asked Kyouken-chan for help.’

And he squeezes Hajime’s hand. With his own hand. Which Hajime is somehow still holding, in the bit of space next to Matsukawa’s empty tea mug that Oikawa has claimed for himself, although there’s absolutely no need to do that any more. He pulls away quickly and scowls at his dried-up porridge, uncomfortably aware of the heat climbing up the back of his neck.

‘Shittykawa. Don’t think I’m not still mad.’

‘You won’t let me forget it, I’m sure.’

Oikawa leans into him briefly, then shamelessly empties Hajime’s glass of pumpkin juice and jumps to his feet before Hajime can cuff him over the head for it. ‘Let’s go. We’ll be late for Charms.’

That very same afternoon, Hajime is trudging down a dusty sixth-floor corridor after Oikawa, who is apparently determined to get this over with before Hajime can bail on him. He has a vague idea of where they are – he’s done too many night patrols in the past three years to not have a rough mental floor plan of the castle –, but they’ve definitely veered off the beaten path a while ago. Most of the paintings that line the walls are asleep, which is a sure sign of very little foot traffic.

He’s not nervous, just a little… apprehensive, Hajime tells himself as they pass yet another heavy wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been opened in about a century.

‘How did you find this place, again?’

‘Kyouken-chan did’, Oikawa says over his shoulder without slowing his purposeful pace. ‘He has an unnerving range of secluded corners at his disposal, if you ask me.’

‘Pretty sure he found at least half of them trying to hide from you.’

Oikawa takes pity on him and laughs. ‘It’s okay to be nervous, Iwa-chan.’

‘Not my therapist’, Hajime reminds him.

‘My bad’, Oikawa shoots back, looking unruffled. ‘I’ll remember not to show sympathy anymore. Ahh, here we are! Seventeenth door from the bust of Eupraxia Mole.’

He stops in front of what appears to be a blank stretch of wall. Hajime blinks, but then he realises that the distance between the last door they passed and the next one down the corridor is much larger than average. Oikawa’s murmured spell confirms his suspicions.

‘Why is this door disillusioned’, he asks flatly while the charm peels off and an old panelled oakwood door flickers gradually into visibility.

Oikawa throws him a curious glance. ‘Because I disillusioned it after I came here yesterday’, he says, like Hajime is a simpleton. ‘Alohomora is one of the first charms the first-years learn and a locked door is basically an open invitation to most of them. You don’t want _them_ to have a run-in with the boggart on a nightly excursion, do you?’

Hajime stares at him.

Oikawa clicks his tongue impatiently. ‘I wasn’t planning to fuck with you, I promise.’

‘That’s not–’, Hajime starts and then shakes his head when he finds that his voice sounds sort of choked. ‘Never mind.’

He could definitely have picked a better time and place to discover that this particular brand of Oikawa caring, privately and off-handedly, is hot now.

Oikawa looks sceptical, but seems to decide it’s not worth it and turns back to spell the door open. The interior of the room is… grey. There is a thin ribbon of square glass block windows opposite the door, too high to see out of, and so dusty that the light filtering in has the colour of curdled milk. It seems to fizzle out uselessly about halfway down, long before it reaches the stacks of old wooden chairs that fringe the wall below. An enormous blackboard with faded chalk marks covers most of the wall on the right, and a row of low oaken cupboards runs along the one on the left. The floor, too, is dusty, with several sets of footprints crisscrossing the uneven slabs of stone – Oikawa and Kyoutani’s, presumably.

‘You couldn’t have picked a less dodgy-looking disused classroom?’, Hajime asks from the threshold, putting the stress on Oikawa’s own phrase from a few days before.

‘These things have to be done in style, Iwa-chan’, Oikawa replies confidently, stepping past him. ‘Come on in, I want to close the door just in case. Okay?’

‘Yeah, I guess’, Hajime mutters. He takes two steps inside, but doesn’t touch the door.

Oikawa strides into the centre of the room and with a graceful arc of his arm manages to light a good two thirds of the candles on a huge, impressively ugly chandelier that’s suspended from what appears to be a very flammable brocade cord. He frowns at it, and with another sweep lights the rest of them, too, before spinning around to face Hajime and the door with a proprietary sort of expression.

‘Appropriately theatrical, isn’t it?’, he comments from under his sudden crown of light and wildly swirling dust motes.

‘Certainly makes it easier not to step into mouse shit’, Hajime says drily.

Oikawa grimaces and picks his way back to the door more carefully. At the dull, ominously final clank of its heavy iron bolt, he looks abruptly hesitant. With a small burst of fondness Hajime realises that the script that had carried him until here never ran further than the two of them in this room with the door closed, and that he doesn’t know how to go on from here on out. He’s nervous, too. Somehow that makes the whole situation slightly less awful.

‘If this was a lurid romance novel, this would be the part where we start making out’, Oikawa jokes weakly.

‘Compared to the other thing, infinitely preferable’, Hajime counters before he can stop himself. It’s part honesty, part evasion tactic probably.

It’s probably also in his voice, because barely a foot from him in the half-dark, Oikawa is standing very still. The tiny reflection of the chandelier in his eyes disappears once, twice, three times as he blinks in quick succession. Hajime barely keeps himself from leaning forward to see more closely.

‘Nice try’, Oikawa says finally, turning his entire body with the words. He moves past Hajime, plunging into the light, crossing it, and disappears into shadow on the other side, the rest of his sentence drifting across the room: ‘But that doesn’t get you out of what we’re here for.’

‘Too bad’, Hajime mutters.

He shouldn’t have had much time to think about this today, and yet he’s missing whole stretches of class hours that were spent disentangling feelings; reluctance, nervousness, curiosity. How much of his acquiescence is down to making up two years of silence to Oikawa; how much of Oikawa’s eagerness to help is down to morbid fascination; how much of all of this is he willing to put up with. How much of it is annoyance at himself for never attempting again before, how much of it is childish defiance in reaction to Oikawa wanting to solve Hajime’s problems, and how much of that in turn is down to how rescuing Hajime is not Oikawa’s business, which is new, because they have always been each other’s business, haven’t they, and what sense does it make now to push him away because he isn’t quite close enough for Hajime’s liking in the first place?

He’s been going in circles for all of Transfiguration, which means he’ll have to borrow Oikawa’s notes later.

Oikawa pokes his head back into the light. ‘Are you ready?’, he asks, softly.

‘Yeah. Sorry.’ Hajime shakes himself and goes to cross the room. He forgets to look at the floor.

Oikawa is waiting for him on the other side, by the row of stacked chairs, still looking like a question. The air is a touch cooler here, like something of the boggart is leaking out of its hiding-place, an essence or a taste diluted enough to turn a breath into only the barest nip of unease.

He doesn’t need Oikawa to point out the right door. There is a quiver in the wood, a rattle in the hinges against the firm hold of the lock. He takes a breath, a lungful of stale air and something cold, takes Oikawa; the smoothness of his forehead; the smudges under his eyes like fine fingerprints, the mark of seventh year; the firm line of his mouth, tense, and protectively quiet about it; squares his shoulders and turns to face the cupboard fully.

When he spells it open, his wand hand shakes only a little.

At the sight of what tumbles out the door, like it’s been stuffed in there before, a thing with real weight and heft, welcoming gravity, Oikawa behind him draws a sharp breath. Only that sound keeps Hajime from spinning around on instinct.

It’s quite good, objectively viewed. The likeness is astute, updated to seventh-year Oikawa, on his back this time so that the Captain’s badge on his chest catches the candlelight. There’s nothing too outwardly gruesome – both his arms are flung out in a parody of victory, eyes wide open, his broom buried under his body and only a thin trickle of blood from the one ear that Hajime can see. But there is a stillness about him and something in the line of his back is wrong enough to make Hajime’s whole body shudder.

Somehow, it’s both worse and better than last time. Better, because Hajime has had two years to lock his mind against images like this. He’s not perfect at it, god no, but much better than the panicked fifteen-year-old in a cavernous examination room who had still been chafing from the new routine of flooing out to St. Mungo’s after classes. He’s got his occasional nightmares catalogued tidily away; it’s not the shock of something new. Better, because he’s had two years of Oikawa alive and moving, healing and flying and coming back from that, instead of two weeks of Oikawa in a white bed, still and supine. Better, because he has Oikawa right behind him, just there, with no need to look.

Worse, perhaps, because he’s had two more years of thinking about danger, and sheer luck, and almosts.

As he stands there, wand hand still outstretched but motionless, the image settles. Or rather, his mind lets it go, abandoning the whole to home in on the details. Like with most incomprehensible things, parts of it can be explained; the unbearable can be borne in bits and pieces. The fold in his robes over a shoulder that doesn’t look quite right; the clean shell of his ear; the glint of the Captain’s badge. In the six, seven seconds of silence, only broken by Oikawa’s shallow breaths, understanding drips slow like honey and then crystallises in that pinprick of light, bright and devastating: there is no way he can turn Oikawa, dead, into something to laugh at.

But he can’t stop looking either. The left foot, turned outwards at the ankle like it does when Oikawa falls asleep on the lakeshore, on a couch, on top of the covers. A tear in his robes where the fabric is abundant, near the hip, gaping dark into folds and folds. A single bristle on the floor by his head, unexpectedly straw-coloured on the dull stone.

Oikawa steps in front of him.

A ripple goes over the boggart, like it’s reluctant almost to transform, like it, too, has settled into Hajime’s looking; but then it clouds and rises, Oikawa’s form not disintegrating but somehow still gone, drawing something about itself to assume another. Oikawa’s wand whips sharply.

‘Not now’, he snarls, turning away like the boggart is of no significance, and then, his voice barely corralled: ‘Iwa-chan, breathe.’

His eyes are wild. Behind him, a swirl of smoke collapses soundlessly into itself, the quietest way Hajime has ever seen a boggart go.

Oikawa touches his face. ‘Breathe’, he instructs again, sounding like he has barely enough air himself.

Hajime obeys. With the oxygen, awareness floods his body. He finds his wand hand back at his side, a bruising tightness in his stance and shoulders. Once noticed, his locked muscles loosen so abruptly it makes him stumble. Oikawa’s other hand settles on his waist, steadying. For one inhale they breathe together, and Oikawa’s expression breaks raw.

Then he drags something down over his face, a smile like a shutter; and steps back.

‘Wow, Iwa-chan, that was, um. Gruesome.’

His tone and inflection are those of someone complimenting a particularly good ghost story, except they crack over the last syllable. Guilt drops leaden into Hajime’s stomach.

‘Tell me about it’, he mutters, and then goes right after Oikawa, straight into his protective bubble of space, and takes him by the elbow. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

Mutely, Oikawa nods.

They trace their way back through the bright circle, towards the door, where Hajime extinguishes the candles and settles for a simple locking spell. Now that the boggart is gone, the room, plunged back into its milky grey, is an old unused classroom like any other. He starts down the corridor with no real aim apart from getting some distance between them and the old oak door. Oikawa keeps up, still with that shuttered look. He makes no attempt to remove his elbow from Hajime’s grip.

At the end of the corridor they pass an oil painting, a curiously cubist rendering of two giants stroking a placid-looking sheep. One of the giants lifts an angular hand in greeting and Hajime’s mental map finally rights itself – they are only two corners away from the north-western stairwell with its large arched windows overlooking the lake, where they sometimes take breaks from night patrol to sit on the broad windowsills and watch the moonlight on the water, put up their feet, and talk. Just last week, he’d sat there with Ōhira, one of the Gryffindor prefects, companionably complaining about the state of the broom shed. He steers them right at the next corner, and Oikawa goes willingly.

Just the sight of the stairwell makes him feel less grimy and weird. Through the glass panes, the mid-afternoon light throws latticed shadows on the flagstone floors and warms the blond of the wooden windowsills. He sits Oikawa down in the most brightly-lit corner and conjures him a cushion, which turns out chequered in red and blue. Oikawa accepts it without comment and hugs it to his chest. Hajime wants to touch him, badly, but Oikawa is never shy about helping himself to physical contact and his body language right now, legs drawn up and curled into himself, wants space. So he just climbs onto the sill next to him, still close enough to talk quietly, at a distance easily surmounted by a stretched arm or leg, and watches cloud shadows play over the bronze banister.

At length, Oikawa sighs gustily and shuffles around until he can put his feet in Hajime’s lap. Hajime immediately settles a hand on his ankles.

‘No yelling at me for touching your robes with my dirty shoes?’, Oikawa asks with an attempt at humour.

Hajime glances down at his feet in their smart dragonhide boots. They’re crossed at the ankles, with one heel resting on his thigh.

‘You look too miserable; it’d be like yelling at a kitten.’

Oikawa kicks him half-heartedly and Hajime glares at him, tightening his hold on his ankles.

‘Sorry’, Oikawa says. It’s clear that he’s not talking about the kicking. He’s watching his hands trying to pull a loose thread from the lining of the cushion. ‘I didn’t doubt you, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I’m not’, Hajime assures him. ‘And even if you were, you’d probably have been right to.’

‘I just couldn’t…’, Oikawa says, and stops. He’s pulled out a blue thread and is now winding it around his index finger.

Hajime doesn’t say _I get it_ , because he’s not sure whether he does, really. It’s one thing to see the death of your best friend spelled out in excruciating detail. To abruptly come face to face with your own graphic death is probably a different thing altogether. So instead, he just squeezes Oikawa’s ankles, and Oikawa gives another sigh in response, unwinding the thread and moving it to the next finger.

‘Don’t you dare feel guilty about this, Iwa-chan’, he says after a while. ‘I’ll be fine in a bit, and really I brought this upon myself.’

Hajime has no doubt that he will dare, but he doesn’t need to add that remark to Oikawa’s mental load, so he just hums and leans his head back against the glass. It’s very slightly warmed from the sun, only just noticeable. Oikawa’s legs in his lap are warm too. Between these two points, he feels anchored, secure.

This, too, is different from last time, when all he could do with his barely-swallowed pain and fear was sit in the visitor’s chair and watch Oikawa’s chest move as he breathed until the nurse gently told him to go home and get some sleep. Now, that feeling is distant, already reassured; and his thoughts spiral inwards, to the way his muscles are tight and heavy as though he’s just come out of a workout, to how present his shoulders are. He relaxes them against the glass, towards the hint of warmth, and thinks about stretches and sleep while the cloud shadows move languidly across the floor.

In the drowsy silence, Oikawa starts to fidget – small twitches of discomfort. He keeps watching the lake, face deliberately unaffected, but Hajime isn’t fooled.

‘Take your feet back to yourself before you get cramps, asshole’, he says idly, giving Oikawa’s ankles a little push.

Oikawa sticks out his tongue but does as he’s told, pulling a knee towards himself and propping first an elbow, then, apparently finding that position unsatisfactory, his chin on it. Hunchbacked, the pillow jammed between his hip and the window, he peers at Hajime from under his fringe. There’s a determined glint in his eyes.

‘I’m good now, anyway. Let’s talk about Iwa-chan.’

‘I don’t need a pity party’, Hajime says, scooting around to face him. The sill is too narrow to sit cross-legged, and he’s too far from the wall to lean back against it.

‘I wasn’t about to give you one’, Oikawa says while Hajime is still trying to sort out his legs. ‘I want to talk about how to fix this.’

‘It’s not your job to fix things for me’, Hajime counters. He ends up sort of cross-legged after all, one knee hanging over the edge of the window board, the other leaning against the glass. It’s not exactly comfortable, but then again, neither is their topic of conversation.

‘Isn’t it?’, Oikawa shoots back coyly, then hurriedly flaps his hands when he catches Hajime’s glower. ‘Okay, okay, sorry, no joking, I get it. But don’t be so thick-headed about this, either, then. I don’t want to fix it for you, I want us to fix it together. And if that’s still too much for you, I want to help you fix it yourself.’

‘Why’, Hajime retorts flatly. It’s not really a question, mainly because he already knows the answer, and knows that he doesn’t like it.

So does Oikawa, apparently, because he tries to deflect. ‘Do I need a reason to offer my gracious help to my oldest and dearest friend?’, he asks, fake-confused.

‘You used to be much better at this’, Hajime tells him, half tired and half amused. Oikawa straightens, affronted, and he quickly talks on to intercept the inevitable tirade. ‘You want to fix it because you’re feeling responsible. Which is utter bullshit, and exactly why I didn’t want to tell you in the first place.’

Oikawa blinks and lowers his knee, deliberately opening himself up the way he sometimes does when actually, he wants to draw tighter into himself. Hajime can’t help but admire him for it, even when he knows it’s being used to lie to him. But Oikawa surprises him.

‘Maybe I am’, he says slowly. ‘So maybe it’s a selfish reason, too. Can’t you let me have that?’

Hajime gapes at him, thunder-struck.

Oikawa nods once, peremptorily, like he takes Hajime’s stunned silence for tacit admission. Then he leans forward in one smooth, sudden motion, all the way into Hajime’s space, fixing him into place with a look that draws the air taut around him.

‘And if you get mad at me for trying to make sure I don’t have to see that look on your face ever again, well. Get mad all you want. I don’t care.’

He’s close enough that Hajime feels the words just as much as he hears them, a physical brush of air on skin. The thrill of that wipes away his slight annoyance with their actual content.

‘Selfish’, he breathes.

Oikawa’s gaze flickers. ‘Maybe I am’, he repeats, just as softly.

Then he blinks, quickly draws back to sit upright and claps his hands together, abruptly business-like. ‘Is this what happened last time, too?’

It’s like he’s flipped a switch. It sends Hajime reeling.

‘What?’

‘With the boggart’, Oikawa specifies patiently.

‘Oh’, Hajime says dumbly, bringing up a hand to rub at his face. ‘Right, uh. I tried Riddikulus, and it just kept cycling through different versions of, well. You know.’

Oikawa makes a face. ‘Well, at least now I can say that I do.’ He pauses, regarding Hajime with the handsome, but slightly disquieting scrutiny of a curious bird of prey. When he continues, the delicacy of his tone is at odds with that look. ‘What about today, then?’

Hajime looks out over the water, absent-mindedly pulling at his fingers. Things look fuller than they have in a long time, since autumn. Even the lake seems swollen.

‘Last time I was just, panicked, I guess. The second I saw it, I tried to get rid of it on autopilot, without actually having a plan. Today was different. I had… time to think about what to do, how the spell works and all that. And I didn’t think it would work for me if I tried. Making fun of it.’

Oikawa swallows.

‘Does…’ He clears his throat. ‘Does anyone actually know what they do when you don’t banish them? Will they start _eating_ you at one point?’

‘Dunno’, Hajime says, turning back to him. ‘Maybe if you just stand there long enough, they’ll get bored and leave.’

Oikawa shakes his head. ‘They are supposed to actually get stronger from fear, so maybe let’s not try that.’

‘I’m actually getting less afraid the longer I look at it’, Hajime muses.

Oikawa raises an elegant eyebrow.

Hajime shrugs. ‘No offense. I mean, you’ve seen how I can’t deal with it. But the first time was definitely way worse. It’s no longer unexpected, I guess.’

‘Hm.’

‘And the longer I look at it, the more time I have to tell myself it’s not real, or something. Besides, a boggart like this is… different from your run-of-the-mill monster. For one thing, it’s not actively coming after you. Remember Azumane’s werewolf in third year?’

The entire class had shrunk back from the giant snarling beast stalking towards them, all powerful jaws and coiled fury. Hajime vividly remembers Matsukawa knocking into him as they stumbled back, and Oikawa’s fingers going tight on his arm. He’d been filled with new respect for gangly, awkward Azumane who somehow remained standing, cast the spell, and managed to turn the werewolf into a fluffy white dog with a happily lolling tongue. The resounding instinctive coos from the class had made the boggart fizzle, although not wink out altogether.

Oikawa shudders in recollection.

‘Half of us nearly pissed our pants’, Hajime agrees. ‘That kind of fear is… visceral. _This_ one, though… it’s abstract, in a way, isn’t it? Even when you’re not literally in the room with me. I’m not getting that fight-or-flight instinct. There’s no danger to me.’

‘Except for the danger of my tragic death breaking your heart, of course’, Oikawa says, looking recovered and smug.

Hajime leans over to flick his forehead. ‘This is the _other_ reason I didn’t want to tell you. Don’t be a dick.’

‘You have to agree it’s a little bit flattering, though’, Oikawa presses, but relents at the sight of Hajime’s narrowed eyes. ‘Come on, Iwa-chan, allow me to make light of it a _little_ bit. If I think of it all seriously, I’ll have nightmares.’

Just in time, Hajime remembers that he’s a good person who’s been trying to spare Oikawa guilt, and he bites back something belligerently ironic.

‘Then do it in a useful way, at least’, he says instead. It stills sounds recalcitrant.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, see if you can come up with something. I’m having trouble because I can’t… think of a way to turn it into something funny.’

Oikawa nods, the small, repeated bobs of his head that mean he’s too preoccupied with mulling over information to watch his body language. ‘So that’s why the spell doesn’t work.’

‘I don’t actually know yet’, Hajime cautions. ‘Like I said, last time I didn’t really think, and this time, well.’

Oikawa doesn’t apologise again and Hajime is glad for it, although he suspects it’s only down to Oikawa not really listening anymore.

‘But it could be that’s why it’s more difficult to get it to work’, Oikawa continues instead, still in that drawn-out voice, the words reluctant to separate from their newly-minted thought.

‘Might be, yeah.’

Oikawa snaps back into himself, cocks his head, and then nudges Hajime’s thigh with one shoe, deliberately turned sole-forward. This time, Hajime does swat him for it. Oikawa just smiles.

‘Don’t worry, Iwa-chan. I’ll think of something.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~you can tell by the sheer obsession with touch that this is quarantine writing~~
> 
> [tumblr](https://rauchblauwrites.tumblr.com/)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hajime's having a very weird week. (Co)incidentally, so is Oikawa.

‘I can’t’, Oikawa says in the locker room after Tuesday practice, and then slumps onto the bench by Hajime’s knees with a thump that shakes the wood, ‘believe them.’ He sounds defeated.

Hajime, face stuck in the jumper he’s currently pulling over his head, grunts in response and gets a mouthful of fibres for his effort. He splutters, manages to yank the jumper in place and uses the back of his hand to wipe his mouth, already turning to follow Oikawa’s line of sight to the other side of the room, where Matsukawa, Kindaichi and Watari are making a ruckus over a handful of frog-jelly soap.

‘This stuff is disgusting’, Oikawa rants on from his seat half atop a wadded-up towel. ‘It’s so drying! And I saw Kindaichi use it on his _face_! Iwa-chan, it’s your responsibility to teach him bett– ugh, never mind, I forgot all _you_ use is _this_.’ He picks up Hajime’s own bar of soap and brandishes it accusatorily.

‘We can’t all carry around a small cosmetics store everywhere we go’, Hajime retorts, snatching it from him and dropping it into his bag. There’s an annoying amount of inflection in Oikawa’s sentences, even for his standards. It’s a sloppy cover, but Hajime is exhausted from running diving drills for an hour and not in the mood to pry. Instead, he considers his tie, slung over the hook next to his robes, and decides he can’t be bothered with it before he remembers that he hasn’t bothered with the shirt to start with.

‘You learned Reducio in second year’, Oikawa deadpans in the background, nearing more normal territory.

‘Was that the same year you apparently slept through how not to be an asshole?’

Where even is his shirt? Dimly, he remembers folding it and placing it on the bench.

‘Don’t lie, Iwa-chan, you love my scathing wit.’

‘Not if you’re being contrary for no reason.’

Halfway through the sentence, his brain tunes fully into the conversation with a serenity that’s become recently familiar. They’ve had too many moments lately, prolonged closenesses at the kind of half-distance that feels heavy when held. Usually, they barrel right through that middle ground, Oikawa’s chin coming to rest on his shoulder in an entirely unselfconscious way. Now they maintain it, more often than not, and there’s something exhilarating about this balancing act that makes him seek it out almost on purpose.

‘Ugh’, Oikawa says in response, tipping forward until his face is mashed into Hajime’s jumper. Through the wool, the rest of his words reach Hajime’s abdomen only as a diffuse warmth, even though he’s speaking right into his skin. ‘You can’t just insult and compliment me in the same sentence. It’s very confusing.’

‘It’s called calling you out on your bullshit’, Hajime says, trying to sound impassive rather than embarrassingly pleased and poking a finger into the top of his head for emphasis. Then he spots something white on the bench. ‘Hey, is that my shirt? You’re sitting on a bunch of stuff, dickhead!’

Oikawa only burrows deeper into his jumper. Hajime could step back and watch him face-plant into the changing room floor, which is covered with a satisfying sluice of spring mud, shower water and probably sweat. But he’s weak, so he stays where he is and folds his upper body around Oikawa to yank the shirt out from under his ass. It’s creased now anyway, so he just shoves it into his bag, then rolls up his tie more carefully and puts it on top.

‘Yo.’ Matsukawa appears at his shoulder, peering down at the unmoving crown of Oikawa’s head. ‘What’s got him in a twist?’

‘Honest commentary on his personality’, Hajime says. It’s not even a lie, technically.

‘A tragic occasion, all the more cataclysmic for its rareness’, Matsukawa agrees.

Hajime snorts. With admirable aim, Oikawa jabs Matsukawa in the side without lifting his head. Matsukawa wheezes and jabs back, but good-naturedly.

‘Hey pretty boy, I think you’re sitting on my towel. So anytime you’re done licking Iwaizumi’s abs...’

Oikawa jerks back so violently that Kunimi’s water bottle topples to the floor all the way at the other end of the bench. His face is crimson, and his mouth works soundlessly. The more lucid part of Hajime’s brain distantly regrets the unavailability of smartphones and the resulting loss of priceless blackmail material, but mostly he’s preoccupied with trying _not_ to think about Oikawa, licking– blindly, he catches hold of a sliver of robe and yanks Matsukawa back from his undignified retreat right into a headlock that mercifully allows him to turn his own face into a direction where no one will see it for a bit.

‘That’s your idea of being a wingman?’, he hisses, close to Matsukawa’s ear. ‘Merlin help.’

Matsukawa only snickers. Hajime takes consolatory satisfaction from the fact that it does sound a little pained.

He forgets about the start of that particular conversation until the next afternoon in Potions, when it happens again.

‘Iwa-chan, I can’t’, Oikawa says through the cloud of murky vapour over their cauldron, ‘figure out what we’re doing wrong here, it’s supposed to be mud-coloured, but this is more bole, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘You know I can’t do shit with these vague colour descriptions’, Hajime answers distractedly, counting out lacewing flies onto his chopping board. ‘What’s _mud_ supposed to mean? Soil has so many different colours depending on its composition and the concentration of residual root magic in the– hey’, he interrupts himself sharply, dropping the flies and snatching the glass rod from Oikawa’s hand to hastily plunge it into the reddish-brown concoction that churns out a few phlegmatic bubbles in response. ‘You’re supposed to stir this fourteen times clockwise, dumbass, what are you spacing out for?’

‘Ah, sorry’, Oikawa says airily, leaning back, ‘I must have fallen asleep when you started talking about dirt. Can’t help it, at this point it’s basically a self-protective reflex.’

Hajime narrows his eyes at him, but the stirring and counting to fourteen mean that he can’t snap something snarky back, and the oil-dripping newt eyes already set out on his side of the table are too far away to reach with his unoccupied left hand. When he finally sets down the rod, Oikawa opposite him is painstakingly occupied with crushing some rose petals.

‘You sorry yet?’, Hajime enquires in a low voice, as neutral as possible. From Oikawa’s carefully downturned eyes and the intense focus that his mundane task doesn’t really require, he already knows the answer. Under the pestle, the half-dried petals make a faint noise, not quite a breaking apart. Oikawa’s mouth purses sulkily.

‘Jesus’, Hajime says into the small slimy heap of pickled newt eyes that he’s now scraping onto his set of scales. ‘I’m gonna cut you some slack and assume that you’re having a shit day for some reason. Anything you want to talk about?’

A few tables over, someone drops something large and hollow and metallic on the stone floor. The scales quiver, and a single newt’s eye slithers off the glob of others.

‘No’, Oikawa says, like glass, ‘not really.’

From here on, it becomes a pattern. Leaning over dinner plates, in a library aisle hunting down a reference book, briefly turning away from a game of chess to catch Hajime’s eye over three armchairs, handing him the coffee at breakfast, hushed and half-yawning when they shove through the classroom door to History of Magic at the same time, neither ready to let the other pass first – conversations barely started and already wrenched into something else, sharp in a way that means he’s falling back on it.

By the fifth time, or maybe it’s the sixth, Oikawa is lounging upside down on the couch closest to the lake window with a set of class notes. In the armchair opposite from him Hajime is tired and mellow enough to really listen, and the small stings and annoyances of the last days suddenly make sense together, strung like pearls. It takes Oikawa days, sometimes, to gear up to something; his path littered with aborted attempts and unwitting, oblivious audiences. Hajime watches more keenly after that, watches him tie himself into barbs and evasive manoeuvres until every pause, every quiet moment becomes charged and Hajime becomes tense enough to think he can see the shadows under Oikawa’s eyes deepen with every swallowed admission.

Friday morning he can’t stand it anymore. So when they run into each other in the door to the bathroom, Hajime just out of the shower, his hair still dripping and his tie only half-slung, and Oikawa squinting, uncombed in his silk pyjamas; when Hajime says ‘Morning’, and ‘Makki’s still in the shower, make sure he leaves some hot water for you’; when Oikawa’s glance skips across his face and shoulder like a flat stone across a lake surface and skitters into the steam filling the room behind; when he says, voice rushed, ‘Iwa-chan, I–’: Hajime refuses to let him do it again.

Spilling out of the shower in thick billows, the humidity is heavy at his back, the air in the dorm a solid wall of cold in contrast. The heat of Oikawa’s body is almost tangible in it. A thin trickle of cold runs down the side of his neck, seeps into his collar. He keeps looking at him, refuses to let go until Oikawa says, with the steadiness of practice: ‘I can’t think of anything. We may have to see what happens when you just stare it down, after all.’

He’s looking right back at Hajime, head-on, even as his voice cracks over the final words and his face tightens inwards, crumples, still, still not backing out. Half a minute more and Hajime is going to do something incredibly stupid, like kiss him, so instead he tugs him against his shoulder, against his damp collar, and Oikawa comes.

Hajime closes the bathroom door behind himself and spins them both out into the room, into the turbid grey-green of early morning light filtering through the rain-roughed lake. Holding Oikawa loosely around the waist with one arm, the other hand splayed firmly across the tension in his back, he distantly notes movement at the edges of the picture window, little fish nibbling on the algae that are starting to grow in from the edges of the pane. It’s been a while since the self-cleaning charm has been refreshed.

‘I never took it as a promise in the first place’, he tells Oikawa, nudging a pile of what looks like Quidditch wear to the side with his foot. They sway in place, gently. ‘Did you really think I’d be angry with you?’

‘I’m angry with myself’, Oikawa says, his voice muffled by Hajime’s collar. He’s hunched over in a ridiculous way in order to even get his face there. As soon as Hajime comments on it, he’ll straighten up.

‘You’re such an idiot’, Hajime mutters instead, right into Oikawa’s hair that smells faintly like shampoo and sleep. ‘Always keeping things stoppered up until you’re so worked up about them.’

Against his neck, Oikawa laughs – one abrupt syllable. ‘I’ve been worked up about this one from the start. I just couldn’t find a good time.’

‘I know’, Hajime says, smoothing his thumb down Oikawa’s spine. ‘I think you’d be surprised how many of those times wouldn’t have been so bad. Give me a little credit.’

Oikawa sucks in a breath so jerky with surprise that Hajime is almost annoyed, then goes boneless, as if in apology. A single one of his fingers curls tentatively into a shirt tail that isn’t properly tucked in yet.

‘I’ll try to remember that next time’, he says eventually, the words hot against Hajime’s skin.

‘You… don’t have any more boggart confessions in store, do you?’, Hajime asks cautiously.

Oikawa snorts at that. ‘No, Iwa-chan. I don’t have any more boggart confessions to make.’

‘Good’, Hajime says, and shakes him a bit for emphasis. ‘Stop worrying about it, then. I don’t want to see any more of this guilty creeping around, got it?’

Oikawa’s head grows heavy with a sigh. ‘Yes, sure, Iwa-chan’, he drones, ‘no more guilty creeping around, noted.’

He draws back, that one finger leaving last, and simply talks over Hajime’s half-hearted attempt to make him promise for real. ‘Now, I know it’s harsh to deprive you of my shining presence but you need to let go of me, else I won’t have any breakfast time left and that won’t do at all. Don’t wait up – but please fix your collar and tie before you go.’ Two fingers flutter briefly at his own throat to indicate the correct place, below a smile that’s treacherously innocent.

Immediately distracted, Hajime groans and reflexively tugs the fabric away from his skin. ‘Did you get snot on me, seriously? You weren’t even crying, that’s like, a new low!’

‘I did not’, Oikawa replies with dignity. ‘You already looked like you don’t know how to dress yourself before I even got near your shirt.’

Then he spins hastily, slipping away and through the door before Hajime’s morning brain has fully deciphered the insult. His voice rises on the other side, bubbly and bright and unintelligible, and Hanamaki’s gives counter, more clearly once the rush of the shower subsides. Listening, unthinkingly, Hajime flattens his palm against the border of fabric and skin at his collar, where Oikawa’s mouth has been. His pulse comes to meet him there, faint and steady, steady; steady until it spikes at the pointed clearing of a throat behind him.

‘So’, Matsukawa drawls, honey-voiced and apparently unaffected by Hajime almost jumping out of his skin. ‘Breakfast, then?’

He’s sitting primly on his bed, the second furthest from the bathroom door, his caterpillar brows are lifted as far as they will go, and like an absolute goddamn idiot, Hajime had forgotten that he was still in the room.

‘Shut the hell up’, he says roughly, mostly as a precautionary measure. Matsukawa inclines his head in a demure gesture dripping with falsity, and Hajime kicks something at him from the pile on the floor that he hopes is someone’s very dirty Quidditch robes. It balloons off the floor and then floats gently back down about half a step from the rest of the heap. Matsukawa nods at the pathetic attempt in affable, patient approval.

Hajime sighs, beaten. ‘Just give me a second to change my shirt.’

Oikawa makes it to breakfast with barely five minutes to spare, striding into the Great Hall with his blazer slung over one shoulder, pink-skinned and at ease for all the world. Only the way his breath goes, too carefully measured, tells them that he’s run most of the way from the dorms. Their end of the table share an eye-roll. Hanamaki and Matsukawa scoot apart just enough that Hanamaki can yank Oikawa down by his sleeve to sit between them. It’s a practised routine: Matsukawa slides over a glass of orange juice, Hanamaki thrusts two jam jars at him, and while they do that, Hajime finishes buttering a piece of fresh toast.

He passes it over and Oikawa takes it just as routinely, barely glancing up from Hanamaki’s selection. He grabs half of Hajime’s hand in the process, nearly getting his fingers onto the buttered side. Hajime catches his wrist just in time. Oikawa wrenches his gaze up, then, and his fingers slacken abruptly. The slice of toast teeters. Hajime tightens his grip on it, crushing a corner and getting butter on his own fingers in the process. Oikawa makes no move to take it, only stares at him, eyes wide, like he didn’t expect Hajime at the table he’s had breakfast at for the past seven years.

‘What the fuck is the use of your long-ass showers if they don’t even wake you up?’, Hajime grouses, turning Oikawa’s hand palm up for him and unceremoniously dumping the bread on it. ‘Eat. We’re gonna be late.’

Oikawa blinks, still glassy and distant. Then he nods emphatically, shoves the entire slice into his mouth, and absconds clutching the glass of juice without so much as a word since he sat down. All three of them stare after him with varying degrees of disbelief.

‘What the fuck was that’, Hajime says, somewhat repetitively, because it’s his responsibility to vocalise most Oikawa-related curiosities.

‘And to think I risked mortal peril to save the last of the elderberry jam for him’, Hanamaki deplores, already scraping the jar clean with both a spoon and his forefinger. ‘That scary-looking Gryffindor fifth-year will forever be out for my blood.’

Matsukawa only smiles an infuriatingly enigmatic smile that doesn’t even disappear when he needs to duck the piece of half-trampled bread-roll Hajime lobs at him as they leave the table to trudge towards Defence.

When they get there, Oikawa sits ramrod-straight at their table, _sans_ juice glass but equipped with a smile bright enough it makes Hajime squint. As soon as he sits down, more cautiously than he wanted to really, Oikawa presses a knee against his. He keeps it there for the entirety of the lesson, but never looks up from his notes after that first smile.

He skips dinner that night, and again the next, and breakfast too. Skips quiet evenings in the common room, cuts short study sessions. The weekend is strangely quiet; Oikawa’s absence leaving their established routines with edges jagged enough they all feel them. It’s a big pre-N.E.W.T. Astronomy project; shoulders lifted apologetically. Then a Divination thing; and they all know how their various sceptical energies prevent any and all attempts at serious work. Saying that, Oikawa turns away from Hanamaki and Matsukawa like he’s trusting them to keep a secret, and from their carefully blank faces Hajime knows it’s a lie.

Ironically, this calms him initially. If Oikawa’s only drawing away from him, this is not fifth year all over again, when the pressure of the impending O.W.L.s, and his first year as Captain, and the unshakeable shadow of Kageyama ground him down until he didn’t come back from flying. Fifth year was Oikawa drawing away from all of them. This is different. So Hajime grits his teeth, thinks of the welcome of greenhouses in winter, and keeps quiet, until it doesn’t stop.

The third night in a row that they go to bed with no trace of Oikawa, he keeps his curtains open and his light on, and sits through Matsukawa’s snoring with some long overdue Transfig revision. By the time Oikawa stumbles in looking hollow-eyed and barely conscious, Hajime has nodded off against the gnarly headrest two times and doesn’t know much more about corporeal illusion than before. The whole stupid thing feels like a giant waste of time and sleep, and it probably shows on his face.

Seeing the light, Oikawa flinches straighter and takes an instinctive sidestep towards the bathroom door. His smile comes on like a fluorescent lamp, strained and flickering at first, then with blinding force.

‘Iwa-chan!’, he stage-whispers across the room. ‘You make me feel like I’m sneaking in past curfew.’

‘That’s because you are’, Hajime points out. Chucking the notes off his bed feels much less satisfying than he thought it would.

‘Does it give you a kick to enforce your administrative power over me?’, Oikawa enquires, fluttering his lashes and then immediately ruining the effect with a jaw-splitting yawn.

Hajime sits up straighter and he flees into the bathroom with a squeak. There’s muffled clanking and the sound of a tap being turned on. As a gesture of goodwill to his future self, Hajime collects his notes from the floor and dumps the stack of them on his bedside table. He’s just crawled back under his sheets when Oikawa appears in the bathroom doorway, toothbrush in mouth and his face a ghostly green from the lake window. He just leans there, looking at Hajime like at a mirror, unseeing but certain he’s there. At the small methodical circles of his wrist, Hajime’s annoyance dwindles. It leaves only a pliant sort of affection that he’s too tired to push away.

Oikawa wanders back into the bathroom. The tap runs. Hajime draws his bed curtains. He leaves open the side that goes out to Oikawa’s bed and the bathroom door, and turns his back to it. He’s asleep before Oikawa returns.

Much later, he comes awake to darkness and the cold seeping in from the open side.

Oikawa lies on the inside of his lids when he blinks, face-down over his broken broom handle.

A faint imprint of the image is still there when they settle in the library for their free period after breakfast, every time Hajime closes his eyes against the morning sun. His mouth tastes bitter from two coffees that have done nothing, and somehow having Oikawa across from him again, fiddling with papers, is weirder than having the chair empty. Unease eats away at his insides.

Oikawa leans forward suddenly, chin propped on his palm, and asks: ‘Should we make a schedule, do you think?’

‘Huh?’, Hajime says, abandoning the sentence on Imperius resistance that he’s been trying to read for the past five minutes.

‘For revision. We only have five weeks left starting today! Plus, I need to organise the flying club handover, _and_ we have the Hufflepuff match in three weeks, so I was thinking at least one extra strategy meeting, and we should do some scouting too. I should take Yahaba, I think he wants more one-on-one captain practice, and you have all your rounds and office hours. There’s lots of things to keep in mind. I want to make sure we’re staying on top of all of them.’

He powers through that speech with a cheer so relentless that the two coffees churn in Hajime’s stomach. His eyes go back and forth like he’s surveying a mental to do list. Hajime grips his quill tighter to not reach out and steady both of them.

‘Hey’, he says instead, and Oikawa inhales audibly. ‘Your job in this is to get yourself through the N.E.W.T.s, hand over your kids all in one piece, and to help me make sure we play our best against Hufflepuff. Yahaba will be fine, and so will I. You don’t need to carry all of us.’

‘I know I don’t have to’, Oikawa says, but he looks away. ‘You’re not worried?’, he adds after a pause.

There’s something in his tone, a tiptoeing-round that makes Hajime narrows his eyes. ‘About the exams in general, or the Defence exam in particular?’

Oikawa bites his lip, shuffling his papers. It’s such an uncharacteristically evasive gesture that it would be funny, if Hajime wasn’t so tired of everything it implies. He sighs and leans forward too, for added emphasis, and does reach out now, unthinkingly, to grab Oikawa’s chin and tilt it up. Oikawa’s lips part softly on a startled breath. His skin is sun-warm, and Hajime thinks, now he could probably shut his eyes against the glare and see only white.

‘Tooru’, he starts, and tries not to get distracted by the way Oikawa’s lids flutter at the word. Then Oikawa is twisting away from his hand, eyes screwed shut, and sits up straight, pushing his notes between them, already half pushing away from the table, face turned to the side, as Hajime sits there stunned.

‘Iwa-chan, I–’

There’s nothing to do but let his empty hand down softly on the wood and talk over him, past the tight feeling in his throat, like nothing happened.

‘Listen to me very closely, because I’m going to say it for one last time. It’s not your fault and not your job to fix this.’

‘Oh.’ Oikawa sags back into his seat. ‘I thought–’

He interrupts himself violently.

Hajime would kill to see his expression, but he can’t seem to stop studying the swirls in the wood grain of the tabletop. ‘Yeah’, he answers instead, with equal lack of eloquence, ‘no, I just…’

The shrilling of the bell makes them both jump.

‘Divination’, Oikawa says weakly, shoving papers into his bag. ‘Seven flights up – I’ll be late. See you, Iwa-chan!’

And he’s gone. The bell is still going, piercing and insistent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> absolutely no one:
> 
> me: let's see how much pining i can fold into 8 pages


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ‘You look like you haven’t slept properly in a week’, Yui retorts, mercilessly on-topic. ‘So. Talk.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick PSA that I'll switch to bi-weekly updates from here on, because life is uhh... happening and I have much less time for writing & editing than I did in spring. But I'm hoping that I can keep up the bi-weekly schedule, and I have two chapters in store that only need editing (she said, after spending 6 hours to change roughly three words in _this_ chapter - thank you [@swishy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swishy/profile) for your help and moral support <3).

They do not, in fact, see each other.

Hajime doesn’t make lunch because he gets held up in the greenhouses; and they don’t have any shared classes all day. By the time dinner rolls around, the thought of seeing Oikawa has turned into a lump that sits alien in his stomach. But Oikawa isn’t there yet when he shoves open the doors of the Great Hall with a little more force than necessary. Only Hanamaki sits in their usual spot, eating roast potatoes. Hajime slides onto the bench opposite him, facing the door, and helps himself to a ridiculously large slice of salmon pie in defiance.

He realises what’s happening only after ten tense minutes of shovelling down his food, when someone sits down next to Hanamaki and Hanamaki just nods a greeting and keeps chewing, because he isn’t expecting anyone else to join them. It loosens the lump in Hajime’s stomach somewhat, but seems to tighten everything else.

‘Really?’, he mutters, ‘ _again_?’

Hanamaki flicks a bit of walnut from his toffee bar at him. ‘Eat up, I need you to come outside with me for passing practice. We have an hour before Ravenclaw has got the pitch booked, c’mon.’

‘What is this, an intervention?’

Hanamaki digs out a second sticky piece of walnut and calmly places it on the spoon that’s poised on the edge of the plate. ‘It’s passing practice’, he repeats with a deliberate disregard for subtlety that makes plain the utter futility of resistance, ‘do pay attention, please. And now that I’m thinking about it, you’re quizzing me on Potions afterwards.’

‘I have patrol tonight’, Hajime informs him.

‘One more reason to hurry up’, Hanamaki says, stuffs three forkfuls of toffee bar into his mouth and drags Hajime out of his seat. ‘Let’s go.’

Usually, when Hajime is scheduled for patrols, they turn it into a night in – all the lamps lit in the dorm, two or three beds pushed together and covered with a mess of broom polish and trimmers, study notes, and snacks. He leaves shortly before ten and sometimes when he returns, he finds all three of them asleep in a mess of limbs and the lamps still burning. Tonight, when they come back in from the pitch pleasantly exhausted and their lungs full of balmy spring air, they fit onto Hanamaki’s bed, cross-legged and puzzling out a Potions problem, then back-to-back and quizzing each other on random pages. Sitting like that, the unmoving door looms just at the edge of Hajime’s vision.

‘Fuck’, Hanamaki swears when he fails to list five uses of armadillo bile, and by the sounds of it folds a dog ear into the respective page in his own book. ‘And that’s just one subject! How are we supposed to remember all of this?’

‘Oikawa thinks we should make a schedule’, Hajime says unthinkingly and then wonders whether he’s just given Hanamaki an in, but Hanamaki only groans.

‘Please, no. I don’t want to actually see how much there is still to do.’

‘Fair enough’, Hajime sighs. ‘Okay, repeat the five uses, and no cheating.’

He leaves Hanamaki at ten to ten, still hunched over his Potions textbook. The common room is as usual, lit with candles and conversation. Routinely sweeping a glance over the heads of his housemates, bowed over homework or turned to something or other, one tipped back, asleep with the nose a sharp point catching the light, he spots the team with ease – Kyoutani in a corner frowning at a roll of parchment, Yahaba and Watari sprawled on the Persian rug in front of the fire. From one of the sofas, Kindaichi grins at him and lifts a hand to wave, and Kunimi gives him a sparse nod. Hajime wonders whether Oikawa is banking on drawing this out until addressing it would be more awkward than ignoring it. He waves back and emerges into the corridor, resigning himself to a non-talk over breakfast.

He’s early, so he walks past the ground floor corner halfway between the Slytherin and Hufflepuff dorms where they usually meet up, unslinging his robes as he gets further away from the lake. The water seems to seep into the stone down in the Slytherin corridors, hanging in the air, making them cool and green in summer, clammy in winter. Nearer to ground level, the hallways of the Hufflepuff wing with their kitchen smells are comfortable in winter, but stifling in summer outside of the common room where the windows let in the breeze and the smell of green. Now, in the temperature drop of a late April night, he leans against a wall warmed by the kitchen on its other side and waits, enveloped in the faint smell of baking bread.

A clanking from the barrel entrance around the corner makes him straighten up. A few seconds later Yui appears, her brisk step faltering only momentarily when she spots him before her face lights up with recognition.

‘Oh, hey’, she greets him, crossing the rest of the space between them to slip her arm through his and pivot them around. ‘You alright?’

‘Are you?’, he retorts. She has her hair slicked back in the severe style that’s usually reserved for exams, first days of meeting new prefects, and other intimidating occasions.

‘You’re no fun’, she gripes with approximately the same degree of deflection, but squeezes his arm.

They stay close and quiet for two long winding staircases. At the top of the second one, they pass through a wedge of night air from an open sash window. The first early roses are starting to unfurl in the sunny spots behind the greenhouses; there is a faint sweetness to the chill. He likes it best like that, not the cloying perfume of the full summer bloom that sticks to the back of the throat. Yui tugs him to the right, down a straight, dimly lit corridor. There’s an alcove at the end of it, hung with a heavy brocade drape, that they peer into routinely, then through the door of the History of Magic classroom that’s been left ajar. For a good hour, they wander like that, an unpredictable nightly zigzag of kilometres testing curfew wards and poking into dark corners, and meet only an owl roosting on the sill of a half-bricked window where the external wall runs into the curve of a turret with the abruptness of an unfinished thought.

It’s fully dark outside by the time the stairwell opens up before them, floors gleaming with silken pools of moonlight. There’s a breeze, ruffling the lake surface like a frilly dress, but not enough to move the trees that fringe the edge of the water. This kind of moonlight comes through all the way to the Slytherin dorms, catching on the micaceous bits in the walls and floor as the barest glints of silver. Hajime wonders briefly if Oikawa is down there, now, sleeping, or laughing with the others, his animated face shining with candlelight and brightened water.

Yui climbs onto the window seat and folds in on herself, chin on knees. They’ve done this now and then, since the night of the Ball, when they helped with clean-up and re-furnishing until past four o’clock and then, too tired to go to sleep, just watched the clouds pass over a waxing moon from the smooth, cool top of the Ravenclaw table and talked until the torches started coming on for breakfast. Apparently, that’s something you can’t do without becoming the kind of friends that talk about things until they feel normal-sized again. So Hajime follows her up and lies on his back, legs up against the wall. Eases into the stretch and feels his muscles slowly loosen, and relax. Yui copies him. The windowsill is just about long enough that they can both fit like that, a hand’s breadth between the crowns of their heads.

‘Let’s just hope no one comes through here to see us slacking off’, she whispers, an unseen smile warming the words.

Hajime scoffs, and shifts when the fabric of his robes tightens over his chest with the motion. ‘I’m fully prepared to take off five additional house points for insolence.’

He lets the quiet sounds of the night creep in, then, the push of the wind against the glass, the empty, echoing space between the floors and stairs and walls and ceilings cottoned with darkness, a silence comfortable with the knowledge that things will be talked about. When he closes his eyes, the insides of his lids are silver, too.

Yui sighs, finally, because she’s the braver one of them. ‘Alright’, she says. ‘Koushi.’

Hajime hums. ‘I thought it stopped being weird?’

‘It did. Until he started bringing Daichi along.’

Hajime twists to look at her, but she doesn’t move, so he settles, back down and for words. ‘You still not done with that project? Ours finished weeks ago.’

She rubs her nose. ‘We, um. Kept hanging out.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Just normal things. Talk about homework. Get some sunlight. Complain about Quidditch. Stuff.’

‘Stuff’, Hajime echoes.

‘Yes!’, Yui retorts, defensive. ‘The same kind of stuff _we_ do when we hang out. How is that weird?’

‘I don’t know’, he muses, ‘you tell me. If you have a weekly hangout with Sugawara now and he’s started bringing his boyfriend along, what exactly about that is weird?’

There is a scuffling noise from her feet, and when he strains to look backward without moving his head, he thinks she’s re-crossed her ankles the other way round. She sighs through her nose. ‘Clever clogs. In my house, we make sympathetic noises and listen. But fine.’

Hajime stays quiet until she braces the soles of her feet against the wall and turns her head away, her words going out into the silvered space of the stairwell. ‘I actually like being friends with him. He’s kind, and he’s not afraid to make a fool of himself for a laugh. I have fun when we hang out, but the longer we do, the more… uneasy I get. Because I mean, he’s smart. We talk a lot about Quidditch tactics, and he’s really observant and has a mean eye for players’ strengths and weaknesses, so how hasn’t he figured out yet that I– can’t get over Daichi?’

She takes a ragged breath. Hajime focuses on the places where his shoulders gradually flatten against the wood of the windowsill. There’s something about hard surfaces that takes a weight off the spine. He lets the problem wash over him until he’s thinking of nothing else.

‘It was fine as long as it was just the two of us. Strange, and kind of stressful, but fine. But now? I sit there and I just think about how to get away all the time, as quickly as possible. If he hasn’t figured it out yet he will soon, and then what? And if he has figured it out already, why is he doing it?’

He cranes his head to look at her, and this time she looks back. Their eyes are almost level with each other. It’s surprisingly disconcerting to look someone in the eye upside down.

‘Yeah, he doesn’t strike me as cruel. Not that brand of cruel, anyway’, Hajime corrects himself, thinking of whispers from the sideline and a sharp grey gaze. ‘What then, exposure therapy?’

Yui shrugs with just her hands, a quick flinging outward and folding back of all ten fingers. ‘It feels like he’s trying to become couple friends. Which is sweet, but also the worst, because I am emphatically not ready to be couple friends with _Daichi_.’

The way her voice wraps around the name, both soft and pained, makes him grimace.

‘I mean, I can barely manage being his vice most of the time, but you know all about that. And on top of it, they’re doing a really bad job trying to be couple friends.’

Hajime makes a questioning sound. She sighs on an exhale, and on the next one, and something about that pause washes up a memory of Sawamura’s face behind a cloud of breath, breaking open with a complicated kind of relief.

The idea is so simple it’s almost fantastic.

‘They are?’, he hedges anyway.

‘You’re really going to make me say this out loud?’

He shoots her an unimpressed look, but it feels frayed at the edges already, crinkling; an echo of the same fraying that had been in her voice just now. There’s something about two people acknowledging the same possibility that makes it just a little more real.

She drags a hand down her face, palm pressing over a smile like it’s unwanted.

‘Your intuition is usually good’, Hajime offers. ‘And honestly, Sugawara strikes me as someone who knows what he’s doing. So if you feel like something’s odd…’

She frowns. It makes a crease appear on her forehead that’s usually hidden by her fringe. ‘Koushi’s tactile, you know? The kind of person to pick the seat next to you instead of opposite. Taps you on the shoulder to get your attention, hugs to say hello and goodbye. Daichi… isn’t. Until now suddenly he is. That’s definitely odd. He hugs me goodbye now. We never used to do that. And it’s really awkward, because we’re both kind of stiff, and I’m pretty sure Koushi is laughing at us on the inside.’ She turns again, searching his face.

Hajime looks back expectantly. His feet are starting to fall asleep.

She pulls a face at his silence. ‘They always split up when we’re together. They walk left and right of me. They sit left and right of me. I’d think they were being polite about not making me feel like a third wheel, but they’re still very obviously a couple all the time. Just with me in the middle! I’m sitting there minding my business and they ask me to take a study break and then drag me to look at the sunset!’

He’s too late to bite back a snort, swinging upright when she glares at him. The lake surface rises from behind the window to greet him, shimmering and dark, and needles rush into his feet. ‘They what?’

‘Have neither of them ever read a romance novel?’ Yui throws up her hands.

‘That is pretty textbook’, Hajime agrees.

‘Yes’, she huffs, coming up beside him to lean against the glass. ‘But what are the odds?’

‘Would you be opposed to it?’, he presses after a pause.

She looks ahead, to where the stairs disappear into shadow above and below. ‘I’m not… in love with Koushi, if that’s what you’re asking. But I don’t know whether that would be a requirement.’

‘You know’, Hajime says slowly, now that he knows he can, ‘there was something really weird about the Ball. When we met them by the buffet, remember? It felt kind of… charged, and off, but I didn’t want to bring it up with you because you were pretty obviously trying to put something behind you, and they were a couple, so I thought I’d misread something.’

She gives a quiet exhale, like a plea.

‘We work out together sometimes, Sawamura and I, right? We’re not really friends, I’d say, but we hang out sometimes, go for a run. That kind of stuff. Started in fourth year, or something, and we’ve been doing it on and off ever since. We never really talk about… personal things. But he did ask me, after the Ball.’ He huffs a laugh at the memory of Sawamura’s expression again, his face and hair and woollen hat dark against the snowy grounds of a winter run. ‘I thought I was about to get the big brother talk, back then, but now I wonder. I told him no, we’re just friends, and he seemed almost… relieved, but in a strange way. Guilty about it, maybe. In a single guy, I would have thought that pretty clear-cut.’

‘So what?’, Yui says, hard. ‘You’re telling me they want what, a threesome?’

‘Seems a lot of effort for just that.’

She whips around to face him and he shakes his head quickly. ‘Look, if this turns out to be getting your hopes up for nothing, I’m sorry. But I did think, before all of this, that there’s something strange about him, with you. And Sugawara… as I said, he doesn’t strike me as someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

A long, silent, assessing look, her eyes like flint in the half-dark of a cloud sidling across the moon. Then she shakes herself and twists to knock her fist against his shoulder. ‘Well, gee, Hajime. Your turn to talk.’

Impulsively, instead of saying _think about it_ he says: ‘Sure. But come along, I want to show you something.’

She hops down from the sill and, following him down the staircase, rakes a hand through her hair. It takes him most of the way down to tell her about this morning in the library, and it’s surprisingly easy – she’s earned the distraction and the laugh after all. And maybe it’s in the way he tells the story, but laugh at him she does, and it makes him feel infinitely better than Hanamaki’s stubborn avoidance of anything Oikawa-related, like Hajime is explosive, or suddenly fragile.

‘Sorry’, she gasps when they reach the narrow, unadorned corridor that leads out to one of the small side doors. ‘It’s okay to laugh, right? Is it okay to laugh?’

‘I’m not mad’, he assures her, and then laughs, too, one helpless syllable. ‘Fuck, this is so dumb. What do I do if he still ignores me at breakfast tomorrow?’

‘Well, you have Charms together third period, so unless he plans on skipping that and then dropping out of school, he can’t avoid you forever.’

‘I guess.’ Hajime unlocks the door and shoulders it open. The night rushes at them, vast and layered deep with green smells after the stale, confined air of the corridor.

Yui lights her wand and takes a few long steps into the wet grass, her robes billowing out behind her. ‘Imagine always looking over your shoulder to not get caught by patrol’, she says, spinning slowly. ‘How much less nice this would be.’

‘Just different nice’, Hajime says, catching up with her. ‘I kind of miss the thrill of sneaking out sometimes. Don’t you?’

‘I always thought it was terrifying’, she confesses cheerfully, squinting at the ground and carefully stepping round a large slug. ‘Hey, can you give me some light on the grass for a second? I’d like to try something.’

He directs his Lumos downwards until she’s satisfied with a steady, smooth circle of light and then idly watches her extinguish her own wand and tap it twice to the fingers of her other hand, which is stretched right into the beam of his Lumos, folded and angled carefully.

‘What are you…’

She nods to the ground with her chin and he looks down just in time to see a shadow bunny peel itself from the rudimentary bunny shape of her hand and join two others hopping around the circle of light, shaking out their hind legs happily.

‘Oh’, he says, and it comes out coloured with surprise. ‘That’s cute. Where’d you get the charm?’

‘Koushi made it.’ Yui bites her lip and then swats at him when she sees his expression. ‘Don’t– it’s not– we have this first-year who’s scared of shadows in the corners and I mentioned her once because you know Koushi made this little animal night light spell a few years ago that we teach to all our first-years now, and I thought he could help!’

‘U-huh.’

‘You’re the worst’, Yui says and sets off in the direction of the greenhouses, leaving him to shepherd the shadow bunnies. ‘Anyway’, she adds pointedly, her own wand alight again now, too, and held aloft to light their way properly, ‘we were talking about Oikawa.’

‘Hey, hold up’, Hajime calls after her, ‘we’re not that fast here.’

She stops, her face softening as she watches him cross the green with his light kept carefully on the grass for the bunnies to flit through, and then picks up a slower pace when he’s reached her.

‘Keeping them?’

Hajime shrugs. ‘For a little at least. They look like they’re enjoying themselves.’

‘You on the other hand look like you haven’t slept properly in a week’, she retorts, mercilessly on-topic. ‘So. Talk.’

He raises an eyebrow at her but she just stares him down, looking determined. So Hajime resigns himself to his fate.

‘I’m worried about him, I guess. He has like fifty things on his plate anyway, and I’m pretty sure that on top of that, now he’s off trying to solve the boggart thing by himself. I told him to leave it, but. Well. I don’t think he’s listening, as usual. And you know how he gets when he’s obsessed with something.’

He lets the cone of light ghost under the clumps of white and purple Astilbe that cling to the corner of Greenhouse Three and watches the rabbits dash into the shadows before he extinguishes the light and touches his wand to the greenhouse door. The prim _click_ of its lock opening is still satisfying even after two years of having this kind of access.

‘And he’s trying to be sneaky about it or something, which just makes everything… tense and weird’, he adds absently, peering into the near pitch-black under the milky glass ceilings. ‘Hold on a sec.’

He conjures up two of the balls of soft warm light that Oikawa likes to have floating around the dorm, and charms them to stick close as they make their way down the mulched paths deeper into the belly of the greenhouse. The wall beside the path is silvery-pale and completely opaque in the light-fingers of their lowered Lumos spells and the glow of the floating orbs. Inside, the greens are bottomless. Layers and layers of coiling, grasping leaves of all shapes and forms, the darkness of which approaches but never quite reaches black. Earthier, they swallow the light and give back shape and substance.

In the midst of this, the open flowers are a shock of white.

When they come closer, the plump pillows of the plant fragment into countless small, star-shaped blossoms straining towards what little moonlight filters through the walls and ceiling. Yui drops into a crouch to admire them, reaching out to touch one.

‘They smell lovely’, she says softly. ‘Sweet. Like… vanilla?’

‘And honey and marzipan, as every textbook and gardening magazine will never tire to tell you’, Hajime adds. One of the glowing orbs floats lower, dimming and hovering just over her hands. He bites back a grin and hopes that it doesn’t translate into his voice too obviously. ‘Hey, so, this feel like a date?’

She yelps with laughter, so startlingly loud in the quiet greenhouse that the foliage rustles in protest, and turns around to look up at him incredulously. ‘What? No. We’re on patrol.’

‘And yet I know for a fact that multiple people think this place is the pinnacle of Hogwarts romance’, he says drily. ‘So maybe it’s not the sunset, it’s the company and the intention?’

Instead of stopping to consider this, Yui presses a hand over her mouth and shakes with silent laughter. ‘You’re lecturing me on… this’, she gets out, doubled over, ‘after _that_ story?’

When he frowns at her, wondering what Oikawa’s unhealthy obsession with the boggart thing has to do with romance, she giggles harder. ‘Merlin, Hajime. The one where Oikawa read an attempted scolding as an attempted kiss because of _the_ _company_ and _the_ _intention_?’

‘What?’, he retorts automatically, staring at her air quotes that still hang there even after the sentence is finished, ‘that’s not the sa–’, and then he stops talking and sits down next to her because all the hovering at half-distance, the suddenly-not-touching, the looking away and the drawing away and the hiding away make sense like this, too, and in the sweet, heavy scent of the night phlox that little patient hope unfurls to a fullness that makes his chest feel tight.

They sit in companionable silence, their wands extinguished. The tips of leaves dip in and out of the bubble of gentle light that sways with the floating orbs.

‘Hey’, Yui says softly after a while, ‘if there’s any way I can help, just let me know. With the boggart thing, and in general.’

‘Thanks’, Hajime says, and means it. ‘I don’t think so though, at the moment. I realised that I’ll have to do something about it, probably, but right now, I’d like to just let it go, really. The chances of getting a boggart in the practical are so slim – or I could literally just tell them beforehand. So I’m not really worried about the N.E.W.T.s. It doesn’t need solving _right now_. I just wish Oikawa would… not stress about it so much, I guess.’

Then, looking at the shadows under her eyes and the tightness at the edges of her mouth, he adds: ‘But it already helps to talk about it, so thanks.’

She nods, slow with intent, or maybe with fatigue. It must be past midnight by now; they should be going back to the castle. Before getting up, on a whim, he plucks one of the little flowers and holds it out to her. ‘Here, to make sure you’ll think about it.’

Yui snorts, straightening. ‘Hm yes, still not romantic.’

But she takes the flower and tucks it behind her ear; and after a beat plucks one of her own and sticks it behind his. ‘You too, though.’

It’s velvety and delicate against the shell of his ear, and he instinctively reaches up to adjust it more securely.

‘How did you even think of this just now?’, she asks when they slowly make their way back out of the greenhouse, ducking under low-hanging branches.

Hajime rolls his eyes. ‘I took Oikawa once, and then he made me bring him back like five times because he wanted to take his girlfriend there but didn’t think he’d remember the way.’

Yui shakes her head and mutters something that sounds like _I can’t believe it_ , but then one of the damn glowing orbs gets tangled in a firecracker vine and starts emitting sad little beeps of distress, and the firecracker starts sputtering sparks, and by the time Hajime has got the orb extinguished and the plant calmed down, he’s forgotten about it.

‘You know’, he says to Yui, prodding carefully at what feels like a small burn mark on his chin, the skin there defiantly hot in the cool breeze outside the greenhouse,‘I love this place, but I can’t wait to get out of here at the same time.’

‘It’s the prospect of the next few weeks’, she answers, wisely and absurdly like an oracle, ‘like pregnancy.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a thing’, Yui insists, pushing away his hand and touching her wand to the burn with a quick Episkey. ‘Supposedly, anyway. The final few weeks are so awful that people become less scared about the birth.’

‘What’s the birth in this analogy? The N.E.W.T.s, or leaving school? Thanks, by the way.’

She slides her wand back into its holster and tugs him towards the castle. ‘Don’t take me too seriously. I’m running on five hours of sleep and the sheer terror of facing Arithmancy first thing tomorrow morning.’

Hajime shudders. ‘You and me both. Let’s try to be in bed before two, or something.’

‘There’s one thing I’m actually looking forward to’, he tells her a quiet hour later when they arrive at their usual corner, instead of a goodnight.

‘Hm?’, makes Yui, suppressing a yawn, but then she catches something in his tone, or in his face, and perks up, smiles slowly, all teeth. ‘Ah. You look forward to that? We’re going to _annihilate_ you.’

Hajime grins back. ‘You’d better try.’

He puts the little white-and-purple flower on his nightstand, encased in a light stasis spell, and stares at it until he falls asleep.

Predictably, Oikawa turns running into an art form. He’s already gone when Hajime wakes up, and doesn’t show up for breakfast. After sitting through a double period of Arithmancy of which he remembers barely anything beside Yui’s initial questioning look, in the Charms classroom Hajime finds the seat next to him stubbornly empty. Oikawa skids through the door at the last possible second and uses the hard look of their professor as an excuse to slip into the nearest unoccupied chair with an effusively apologetic air. In the milder light right by the door, he looks pale and drawn, something defeated in the careful loops of his hand across parchment.

Hajime catches him in the hallway just outside of the classroom, where he’s skating the tail end of the lucky group heading into a free period, arms linked with Aihara from Hufflepuff who’s in Divination too and some kind of clairvoyant, though never for useful questions. It’s been barely three steps and they’re already deep in discussion about the predictive power of planetary motion and some trick question about something called retrograde that apparently at least one person falls for every year. Undeterred, Hajime hooks a finger into his collar to hold him back. If he relishes the way Oikawa jumps a little out of some sick sense of satisfaction, no one has to know.

‘Sorry’, he says to Aihara, who looks mildly amused as if she knew and chose not to warn Oikawa on purpose, ‘I need to borrow him for a sec. You’ll get him right back.’

‘I’m not _property_ ’, Oikawa protests, snaking out from under his touch, but Aihara just grins.

‘Go be lectured, Tooru. I’ll snag the best telescope so that I can show you I’m right.’

‘Don’t think I won’t be checking it for spells when I get there’, Oikawa chirps after her retreating back, laughing when she flips him off in response. When he turns to face Hajime, he doesn’t so much drop the laughter as reabsorb it, with a protective hardening of stance and face.

‘So, what am I being lectured on today?’

Hajime ignores him. The apple he swiped from the breakfast table earlier sits heavily in his pocket, and his stomach feels alight with nerves. He wants to tell him it’s okay; he wants to place his thumbs over the smudges under his eyes, eight other fingers sliding into his hair, and the sudden bright need to find out how Oikawa’s face would fit into his hands like that eclipses any useful ideas he might have had about other things to say. So he falls back on annoyance.

‘Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but when I said _no more guilty creeping around_ , I didn’t mean exchange it for whatever the fuck this is. If you suddenly don’t want to see me or something, that’s whatever, but you’re supposed to be an example to the team and this is not how you do it. You’re planning on skipping most of your meals till when, exactly?’

Oikawa doesn’t step back, but something flickers in his posture. ‘You must be very busy, Iwa-chan, are you sure you have the time to always worry about me?’ His tone is sweetly empty.

It stings, but Hajime has also known him for too long to not recognise this for what it is – a reflexive pushing away that means he’s guarding something. The thrill of that confirmation comes rolling up his spine, slow and rich. How to tell him _it’s okay_ , but not too overtly?

‘You’ve got secrets, I get it. And you’re entitled to them, I’m not trying to– whatever, just, eat a goddamn piece of fruit and try to go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once this week, alright?’

Their Charms professor pokes her head out of the classroom. ‘You two boys okay, there?’

‘Yes, sorry’, Hajime says quickly, mortified. Oikawa nods in back-up, and flashes her a chastised smile, and after one more sharp look she disappears back inside the room. Hajime grabs Oikawa’s arm to start walking in the direction of the Astronomy tower, but Oikawa digs his feet in, eyes fixed on Hajime’s hand on his sleeve. By increments, Hajime lets go. The side of Oikawa’s throat moves almost imperceptibly as he swallows. He watches the now empty spot on his sleeve for a moment longer, assessing, and when he looks up he’s wearing one of the faces that Hajime likes best – a challenge, open and steely and determined, that instantly changes the air in the corridor.

‘You’re right’, he says, ‘I’ve been scared. Again. Thanks for always – what did you call it? Calling me out on my bullshit.’ And he leans in, obnoxiously close, voice dropping to a murmur that raises the hair on the back of Hajime’s neck. ‘So dependable.’

Caught off guard by the sudden one-eighty in demeanour, Hajime squints at him wordlessly for a second too long.

‘I’ll try my best from now on, alright?’, Oikawa continues, silky-soft like a promise, and then bounces back, whipping out one of the godawful cutesy peace signs and the corresponding register. ‘Now, I need to go see what Mao is up to. I’ll see you in Herbology, Iwa-chan!’

By the time Hajime shakes himself back into action, he’s halfway down the corridor, striding towards the staircase with more purpose and surety in his step than should be allowed.

‘Hey, asshole’, he calls after him, just in time, and when Oikawa turns, throws him the apple, in a smooth, easy arc like forgiveness. ‘Catch!’

They’re in Greenhouse Eight today, the largest and most harmless one, looking at companion planting of magical and non-magical crops. It’s long and wide and impossibly cluttered, half teaching and half kitchen greenhouse, planted with rows upon rows of tomatoes and beans under its rusty iron beams. Salads and herbs grow in raised beds, potato leaves creep over the ground below. Strawberries spill from large white hanging baskets. It’s a dizzying place, divided into zones of different light conditions, temperatures, degrees of humidity by nothing but shimmering veils of containment magic, so that looking down the length of it, there are alternate fields of bright Mediterranean sun and dusky English kitchen garden, as if shadowed by curiously rectangular, ever unmoving clouds.

He’s crouching on the mulched path, over Bokuto’s painstakingly drawn crop plan that’s too oversized for the worktable, trying to explain why neighbouring his pumpkins and potatoes isn’t the best idea despite the decorative border of peonies in between. The heavy, sweet scent of sage rests around them. Hajime turns to pluck a leaf and finds Oikawa watching him from across the herb patch. He raises a brow, and one side of Oikawa’s mouth lifts in a slow curl that pulls something between them taut. For some reason, maybe in a twisted recompense for all the absences of the past week, his gaze is impossible to break. And Oikawa holds it; for one breath, two breaths, three.

‘Hey!’, Bokuto bursts out with sudden excitement and Hajime rips his eyes away from Oikawa, his own mouth suddenly dry. ‘Hey, what about sweet potatoes? Can I have those?’

He turns away and back on purpose after that, trimming the nasturtium that’s overtaking the cabbage patch. When he stretches to reach his clippers on the worktop, Oikawa is looking at him, and again after that, not every time, but often enough that Hajime chases it, invites it. Every split second of eye contact is another little jolt, like touching a car door on a cold winter morning.

When he’s done with the cabbages, he drifts back into a sunny spot where, moving along dense rows of tomatoes, slowly pruning, he’s at leisure to look back. At the crown of Oikawa’s head bowed over his notes on the other side of the row. At the back of his head turned conferring with Matsukawa, gesturing down at a bright clump of tagetes at their feet. At the side of his face, that never-still half-profile, his brows dipping and relaxing, his nose crinkling. When Oikawa looks up and lands fully in his gaze, Hajime stills his hands and wills himself to keep it there. A great calm washes over him. Oikawa’s eyes skitter away and return, and widen; the lines of his face tense, teeth dig into his lower lip. Over the tomatoes Hajime just keeps looking at him and feels the power in it, rising like the tide. He smiles too, then, slow and sure.

As he watches Oikawa’s inhale stutter, something in his own chest liquefies in answer.

Oikawa’s face changes, then, too fast for the expression to register before he ducks his head and drops into a crouch behind the pea trellises, out of sight. In the palm of Hajime’s hand sits a single tomato, cool and smooth and green, and round with promise like a tiny bell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i heard some of you requesting more pining, and i raise you _mutual and definitely requited_ pining
> 
> I hope you liked it! As always, if you want to chat or yell at me somewhere beyond the comments, you can also reach me via my [tumblr](https://rauchblauwrites.tumblr.com/).


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they play some Quidditch, and Hanamaki and Matsukawa decide to take action.

The pain comes out of nowhere. The sheer impact of the hit is enough to knock him clean off his course; but it’s his buckling elbow, the loss of the hand on the handle, that send him into a tailspin. He yields to it for one, two seconds, knees clamped tight around the bucking broom, until feeling returns to his left hand and he manages to grab the handle again, two-handed now, steadying the broom into a steep upward swerve that brings him out safe above the commentator’s tower. The Quaffle, of course, is gone. Oikawa shoots up from underneath, robes flapping, and pulls into a halt that nearly turns him vertical.

‘Are you alright?’

‘Yeah.’ Hajime feels his left forearm and grimaces. ‘Nasty bruise, probably, but alright.’

Over Oikawa’s shoulder, he spots Kindaichi approaching with a worried frown. Most of the others seem to have paused as well, heads turned in their direction. Hajime guesses it’s not too often that they see him almost spin into the stands, so he gives them a reassuring wave that turns Kindaichi back to the goal posts on the other side of the pitch, where he’s supposed to be practising with Matsukawa. Hanamaki salutes him in return.

‘I’m sorry’, Oikawa says, still hovering by his shoulder, ‘that one went–’

‘Wildly off course, yeah’, Hajime finishes for him. ‘Don’t mind, idiot. It happens.’

He gingerly opens and closes his hand. It works fine.

Oikawa watches, chewing on his lower lip. They haven’t had such a hard combo miss in a while – he usually bounces back from them pretty quickly, but there’s a badly hidden frown on his face that Hajime doesn’t like.

He fixes him with his sternest glare. ‘Let’s go again. Same hit, I’ll keep an eye out this time. If you don’t give it the same force you usually do, I’ll push you into the stands.’

Something in Oikawa’s face loosens.

‘I _always_ do my best, Iwa-chan, you don’t have to threaten me for it’, he simpers and vaults into an about-turn that sends him ten metres away. ‘Besides… you talk big for someone who’s just lost his Quaffle.’

And he speeds off.

‘That’s right, run away!’, Hajime calls after him.

‘Stop slacking off’, Oikawa yells back, now from halfway across the pitch, ‘you’re a bad example for everyone else!’

‘You focus on not taking anyone’s head off, Shittykawa!’

He spies the Quaffle near the foot of the stands and swoops to pick it up. By the time he’s back at the height of the goal posts and starting his approach, Oikawa is back with his Bludger, too, zig-zagging after it down the length of the pitch, his bat light the way it is when he wants to keep the ball close, waiting. His control is precise. It looks effortless, harmless almost, the way he’s herding it along with a touch here and there. From this, when it comes, the strike is a sudden eruption of force.

Hajime sees it coming this time, but he wouldn’t have needed to. The path is clean and steady, right past his shoulder and into the hoops where it would have forced a Keeper to swerve, clearing the path for the Quaffle in its wake. Oikawa comes hard on its heels and they pull level for a moment, each chasing after their ball.

‘Iwa-chan’, Oikawa shouts over the wind and then they rip apart, Hajime diving after the plummeting Quaffle and Oikawa dashing upward as the Bludger makes for the sky. The rest of his sentence reaches Hajime’s ears only in shreds.

‘If you’re so _overtly_ suspicious, everyone will know what’s coming!’

‘Had to make sure you’re not chickening out!’, he calls, rising again with the Quaffle firmly under his arm. ‘Come on, again. I’ll pay less attention this time.’

He watches Oikawa zip down the pitch, keeping so close to the erratic fleck of black that sometimes it’s impossible to say who’s following whom.

‘The Quaffle is just mechanics’, Oikawa’s voice says in his head, much higher, and somehow both smug and slightly breathless, ‘all you need is good flying and a good aim.’

‘I’ll show you aim’, Hajime had said, already reaching out, and Oikawa had ducked back, cradling his hands close.

‘No, no wait. Chasers are very skilful too, okay, yes, but – Iwa-chan, wait, I want to show you something! Look, the Quaffle is a ball. When you drop it, it drops. Right? The Bludgers… _think_. To a limited degree, of course, but whatever kind of spell is on them makes them act and react. And Iwa-chan, I think—I think you can tune into that a little, when you do it just right.’

‘What, you mean like mess with them?’

‘Not in a cheating way!’ Oikawa had looked genuinely wounded. ‘I mean like really good Beaters. When you look really closely, their Bludgers behave differently. Those with a more aggressive style, and those with a more tactical kind of aim. And it’s not just about the force of the hit. It’s more. I don’t really know how it works yet, and I can’t get it right every time, but…’

And he’d taken a deep breath and carefully opened his hands, where he’d been holding a Little League Bludger, slower and softer than the Youth League ones but still bewitched to trundle up and smack you – gently – in the face if you let them go like this. The black ball on Oikawa’s palm had quivered, and stilled.

‘Look, Iwa-chan’, Oikawa had whispered, voice filled with wonder. ‘It’s easier with these because they’re not so aggressive, but if I practise a lot, I’ll eventually be able to do it with a regular one. I know I will.’

‘That’s… kinda cool’, Hajime had said, hesitantly, reaching out to touch it. ‘But what would you want with a tame Bludger?’

‘It’s not tame, silly’, Oikawa had said, closing his other hand protectively over the ball. ‘If I stop thinking really hard about where I want it to go, it will come after us like usual. But usually, when you hit one past too many people, or someone’s flight path gets too close to it, it will get distracted, right? There’s only so much you can do with a Bludger if you’re too far away from the problem. You hit it, and everyone scatters. But like this – I think I could make it go past you, but closer, and _clear your way_.’

It comes again, now, zooming past his elbow so close that he feels its air current and cutting sharply across the goal posts. Even after what must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of practice like this, Hajime gets an echo of the sense of awe from that very first afternoon on the field behind their houses, during their first Hogwarts summer holidays, from the sheer conviction and the possibilities opening up in Oikawa’s voice when he’d said: ‘Practice it with me, and if we play our cards right, we’ll be on the House team next year’.

They’d spent whole weekends in the library in their second year, trying to find out how it worked and how to stabilise it, but the charms on the Bludgers are too closely guarded to hazard more than guesses at the magic behind them, and there was almost nothing from actual Beaters on trying to control them. Some of them were probably doing it unconsciously, and most of the others either didn’t want to give up an advantage, or were uneasy about being accused of undue influence. In any case, their research didn’t turn up more than an old interview translated badly from Romanian that made Oikawa take meditation classes for a summer to improve his focus, and a self-published autobiography speculating on the ‘mythical bond’ between Beater and Bludger, the first chapter of which they took turns reading to each other before getting kicked out of the library for giggling and dramatic voices. When they’d met Kageyama Tobio and his eerie command over the neighbourhood Little League Bludgers, Hajime couldn’t help but think that maybe that autobiography had been onto something, underneath all that flowery talk, given that even Oikawa, when pressed to explain, resorted to phrases like ‘tune in’ or ‘feel for’ the Bludgers’ magic.

Hajime himself has never gotten anything from them except bruises, so maybe it’s true that some people are more susceptible to it than others. Oikawa, certainly, has clawed his way here, from obsessively watching trajectories and noticing minuscule differences and holding Little League Bludgers on his open palm to this, to the whistling swipe of a full-size iron Bludger that can make entire stands fall silent.

It looks so effortless now, six years later, that it’s easy to forget how delicate the move is.

Hajime is rudely reminded not fifteen minutes after, in their first three-on-three, when he has to do a rapid barrel-roll in order to avoid having his nose taken off. It leaves him with a weird twinge in the neck, and Oikawa with a more permanent version of that half-frown. When the next shot goes wide instead, Hajime calls a time-out and motions him over.

When Oikawa is out of balance, it becomes most apparent on the pitch. As little as they know about that strange connection, it’s long been evident to Hajime, from Oikawa’s fatigue and occasional headaches after long matches, that there is considerable mental strain involved, even if Oikawa usually waves him off with a snide comment about how thinking isn’t as difficult for other people, Iwa-chan, you can’t just apply your own standards to everyone else. So when his focus wavers – when he’s preoccupied, or panicked, or hurt –, the connection too waxes and wanes.

Oikawa pulls level with him. He looks pinched, poised to apologize, and Hajime holds out a hand to stop him.

‘Did you get hurt?’, he asks bluntly. ‘Don’t lie to me right now.’

Oikawa shakes his head, lips pressed into a thin line. ‘In case you forgot, I’m usually the one doing the hurting in this game.’

Hajime closes his eyes for one grounding breath. It doesn’t help very much, so he reaches for a fistful of Oikawa’s robes and hauls him closer. ‘How often do I have to tell you, you’re not the only one supposed to look out for Bludgers? The rest of us have eyes and brains too. We’re plenty capable of getting out of the way if we pay enough attention. So quit the self-flagellation already!’

For one charged, silent moment, Oikawa stares at the fabric bunched up in Hajime’s hand. Feeling strangely self-conscious, Hajime lets go and Oikawa immediately moves back, bringing more space between them. His face is wiped so clean it hurts to look at.

‘So you keep telling me, Iwa-chan. I’m not worried about that, don’t get your knickers in a twist.’

Hajime clicks his tongue. ‘What else is it, then? You’re a shitty liar even off the pitch, but _on_ the pitch there’s no way I can’t tell something’s bothering you.’

‘You do realise I’m a _shitty liar_ only to you, do you?’, Oikawa murmurs. The corner of his mouth twitches like he’s made some kind of private joke.

‘Oi!’, Hanamaki hollers from over by the goal posts before Hajime can properly pick apart the back-handed compliment, or admission, or whatever it was, ‘stop flirting, you have a game to finish losing here!’

Oikawa straightens, looking away. ‘I’ll fix it. Don’t worry.’

At that phrasing, Hajime groans. ‘Is this about the stupid boggart thing? God damn it, Oikawa, I thought you stopped obsessing over it!’

‘It’s not about the boggart thing’, Oikawa presses out, jaw locked tightly. ‘It’s… I don’t know, Iwa-chan, just leave it, will you? I said I’ll fix it.’

‘I don’t–’, _believe you_ , Hajime almost says, because Oikawa doesn’t get aggressive about not knowing things, he gets quiet; lashing out like that is for private, uncomfortable things that Hajime is getting too close to. But Oikawa’s shoulders are pitched at a protective angle, so he forces himself to drop it for now, and sighs instead.

‘Never mind. Let’s go, Hanamaki’s right. We’re holding up the game.’

Oikawa whips off too fast for it to be anything but relieved.

For the rest of practice, Hajime does his best to focus on the game, but the conversation leaves him uneasy, his concentration jarred; and Oikawa doesn’t help, sending textbook Bludgers and hushed glances. By the end of it, he looks hunted and Hajime himself feels strung so tight he’s ready to snap. The way the others are giving him a careful berth tells him it’s showing, too. He grits his teeth and makes himself smile at them, trades sentences and water bottles. It helps a little. The team is good at carrying, after all; even though they’re not quite used to carrying him. It shows in traces of unease, of hesitancy in their jokes and chatter. Hanamaki and Matsukawa do the bulk of it, and he’d be grateful to them, if they weren’t also simultaneously and silently hell-bent on not giving him any space to breathe.

In the changing room, they flank him; Matsukawa at his left shoulder and Hanamaki at his right, ostentatiously keeping up conversations of their own, but not good enough to fool him. Hajime yanks off his arm guards, bites back a wince and decides to go shower in the dorms. He stores his leathers away meticulously, cleaning them and re-tying the straps as he goes, until Matsukawa disappears ahead into the shower and Hanamaki is too wrapped up in conversation with Yahaba to instantly extricate himself. He steps out, expecting relief, and finds nothing.

White and blinding, the sky presses down. Instead of peaceful, the brisk walk back to the castle is oppressively silent and unusually long. In the cool green gloom of the dorms, he takes a shower, hot enough to think of nothing but the water, and afterwards wipes free a section of the fogged-up mirror and puts ointment on what is indeed a rapidly developing bruise, as large as his palm, on the outside of his left forearm. No one else is back by the time he’s done. The empty dorm, all heavy walnut and brocades unmoved by the eternal sloshing of the lake against the windows, is unwelcoming in its stillness. He leaves, and climbs, and is almost unsurprised to find himself in front of the rep office.

Sometimes Yui comes here on Sundays too, to study or read or knit. They don’t talk much on these unplanned afternoons, both mindful of the desire for a quiet space that brought each of them there, but it’s a tranquil kind of companionship to just exist in the same space as another person. He craves that now, maybe, on edge with the team and restless on his own; but today, when he opens the door, the room is empty.

The clear grey light filtering in through the windows paints precise rectangles on the floorboards. The fireplace is cold. The sofas and armchairs look so settled in their solitariness that he’s reluctant to disturb them. Instead, he chooses the desk chair, a plain hardwood affair, and sits feeling sorry for himself. It’s an unproductive kind of mood that he dislikes, but he can’t seem to shake it. His mind plays unbidden images and half-sentences, Oikawa’s face on his turn back to the game, slack with relief; the upcoming Hufflepuff match, their last chance to make the cup; the ever-growing piles of class notes that he’ll have to ingest, somehow, in the next three, four weeks; somewhere below them the shiny brochures that he hasn’t even broached with Oikawa, who still talks about scouts and which coast town to best move to for optimal flying conditions. Distantly, he misses the click of Yui’s needles, the whispery drag of the wool, the rustle of her loopy notes inevitably spilling from surfaces to floors. She’s better at Arithmancy, he’s better at Potions; sometimes, on these Sunday afternoons, they migrate together and swap notes, point explanations.

He’s still sitting there staring into space when the door flies open and Hanamaki and Matsukawa waltz in.

‘Called it, Issei, he’s here moping around’, Hanamaki announces triumphantly. He doesn’t acknowledge Hajime beyond that first quick look that actually established his presence, instead veering left and flinging himself down onto the old green sofa with no regard to its prior aloofness, punching a pillow into shape and crossing his arms behind his head with a content sigh. The balance of the room shifts immediately.

‘I’d be miserable in here, too’, Matsukawa muses, also without addressing Hajime. He meanders over to poke at the fireplace and soon has flames springing up, crackling merrily. With a pleased hum, he drags one of the armchairs closer and settles there, putting up his feet on the sofa near Hanamaki’s hip.

A lull falls again, but different. Full of small noises for spiralling thoughts to snag on and splinter. Behind his desk, still thoroughly ignored, Hajime begins to feel decidedly stupid, and stupidly grateful.

He pushes himself up and crosses the cold rectangles to join his friends by the fire, sitting down on the floor between them. The oak boards are cool, but warmth from the fire is licking at his side, and it’s not done growing. Matsukawa immediately moves his feet to Hajime’s drawn-up knees, like he’s just another piece of furniture. He can’t find that he minds.

‘That was a shit practice’, he says finally, breaking the silence.

‘Yeah’, Hanamaki agrees lightly, still pondering the ceiling.

‘For the two of you’, Matsukawa adds.

‘True. While you obsessed over trying to fix your thing, the rest of us had a grand old time. Kindaichi landed a great broad.’

‘Yup. That kid is getting real good.’

‘Kyoutani pulled off a solid combo with Yahaba.’

‘Watari managed his full routine again – said his wrist is all better now.’

‘Everyone was good over drills. Even Kunimi.’

The back-and-forth of their sentences washes over him, steady and reassuring, and slowly pulls him back into himself.

‘There’s five other people on the field, so don’t worry too much.’

‘Even if you both keep fucking up, we’ll still have a solid chance.’

Hajime groans, both embarrassed and consoled. His hands itch to rub his face, or his neck, but Matsukawa’s legs are keeping his arms trapped where they are slung around his knees, so he’s forced into the verbal. ‘Sorry. I guess we both got too caught up.’

‘Good thing you’re not our fearless leaders.’ Matsukawa nudges him with one foot.

And the thing is, he’s right; and it makes the impending Hufflepuff match already sit lighter on Hajime’s shoulders. While they are of course the leaders, officially, unofficially the team’s strength is all of their independence. It’s something that Oikawa has been working to build since long before he took over the captaincy, even though it’s only really been falling into place since he got the freedom to truly shape the team. Now, it becomes more apparent with every match they play, leaving him breathless sometimes with the sheer sense of power and wonder and _pride_ ; and with Yahaba stepping up next year, it might just become his legacy.

‘Just do better next time’, Hanamaki adds mildly.

‘I will’, he promises.

Hanamaki gives a satisfied hum in answer.

Hajime taps Matsukawa’s leg until he reluctantly removes his feet. Then he gets up, cracks his neck, and drags a second armchair closer to the fire. Hanamaki and Matsukawa share an approving smile that he decides to ignore.

‘Right’, says Hanamaki as soon as Hajime is sitting again, ‘now that this is resolved, don’t you have tea things here somewhere? They had pumpkin crumble cupcakes in the kitchen and I need some tea with them to fortify myself for the second part of this conversation.’

‘Third shelf down behind the desk’, Hajime tells him on reflex before the rest of his sentence registers, and then Hanamaki is already trotting off, leaving him with something sharp and sour knotted into his stomach.

‘Do I dare ask what the second part of this conversation is?’, he says to Matsukawa, who somehow manages to still look like he’s slouching even though he’s now sitting up straight.

Matsukawa looks back, unyielding. ‘You know perfectly well what it is.’

A log pops loudly in the fireplace.

‘No’, Hajime says curtly. It’s a rejection, not an admission.

Matsukawa is undeterred. He even lets one side of his mouth curl, showing a glint of teeth. ‘We’re your friends. It’s our duty to make sure that you air out your tender feelings from time to time, lest they fester and become dark.’

Hajime tries to kick him, only to find that he’s sitting just out of reach. Matsukawa’s smirk grows, and grows again when Hajime glowers at him ineffectively.

‘Oi, which part of _before this conversation_ did you two birdbrains fail to understand?’, Hanamaki complains from behind the desk, gesturing accusingly with the chipped teapot that he’s managed to locate.

‘Sorry, Hiro’, Matsukawa calls back, not sounding sorry in the least. ‘I couldn’t know he’d be so eager to get started.’

‘Oh my god, just… shut up, both of you’, Hajime says into his hands, which are now conveniently free. He doesn’t deserve the two of them, both in the positive and in the negative sense of the word.

‘Seriously, Iwaizumi, when are you going to talk to him?’, Hanamaki asks. He’s now measuring out tea from Yui’s good, loose-leaf stash.

Hajime tries to pretend he hasn’t heard him. ‘Why are you two even here? This isn’t the club room.’ He used to be so much better at this.

‘The club room has Oikawa.’

‘And his veritable library of creepy boggart-related literature.’

Hajime feels his eyes bulge. It’s not a pleasant feeling. ‘His what?!’, he forces out, both slightly choked and much more loudly than planned. His friends ignore him. 

‘One of the books is sobbing, like, constantly’, Matsukawa elaborates gleefully, at a much more appropriate volume.

‘Nobody except him goes to the club room anymore’, Hanamaki adds.

‘So, really’, Matsukawa tacks on.

‘Dude, if it isn’t obvious to you by now–’

‘Oh, I know’, Hajime interrupts their tag team routine. ‘I’m plenty aware. And I know that he is, too.’

Some kind of tension seems to leave the room, with a shrill whistle, aptly; only when he turns around to check it’s just Hanamaki’s wand spouting a stream of boiling water. Matsukawa’s shoulders sag forward into a more comfortable pose. Under both their gazes, Hanamaki floats the teapot over, followed by three mugs and the milk jug from under the cooling charm. He places everything on the low table and then produces a paper bag from somewhere in his robes, unwrapping three small, slightly squashed cakes and handing each of them one.

They have crumbles on top, and thin streaks of sugar icing.

Both of his friends sit with their elbows on their knees, cradling their cupcakes and looking at him encouragingly. It’s a ridiculous situation, but well, here Hajime is. He actually doesn’t feel terrible.

‘I just’, he starts, picking a piece of crumble off the top of his cake, ‘definitely don’t think it’s a great time to have this conversation while he obsesses over solving my problems and we fight about it every other day. He already thinks he’s the problem – I don’t need him thinking he’s the solution, too.’

Hanamaki and Matsukawa stare at him.

‘I can’t decide whether that makes sense or whether it’s a load of bullshit’, Hanamaki finally pipes up.

Matsukawa takes a measured bite of his cupcake. ‘I think I get where you’re coming from’, he says pensively. He’s good at talking with his mouth full. It’s intelligible and not at all gross. Hajime wonders dimly where he put the bite – not even his cheeks bulge out. ‘Avoiding even more co-dependency than you already have?’

The brief moment of innocent contemplation is shattered. He looks at Matsukawa sharply, and Matsukawa looks right back.

Hajime breaks eye contact first. ‘I guess’, he admits.

‘Okay, but still.’ Hanamaki is less good at talking with his mouth full. Thankfully, he realises and swallows before picking his thought back up. ‘I mean, I know he’s full of himself, but… do you really think he’d go full-on _only my love can save Iwa-chan_?’

His voice pitches to match Oikawa’s most complacent lilt so perfectly that Hajime almost drops his cake.

‘Merlin, don’t– _say_ it like that!’

Matsukawa snorts and pours all of them tea. When he speaks, his eyes don’t leave the thread of steaming liquid that’s slowly filling Hajime’s favourite mug. ‘He’s right, though. I think you could do with trusting him a little.’

‘I don’t…’, Hajime starts automatically, but the sentence tapers out just before it becomes a lie. That realisation weighs heavy.

Hanamaki, chewing again, casually delivers the final blow. ‘Also, you talk about avoiding co-dependency, but isn’t all of this really just you trying to save Oikawa from himself?’

Hajime takes one long, deep breath. Feels the slight resistance in the muscles of his upper back that mean something’s clenched there, and takes another. Pushes through, slow and determined, until it loosens a little.

‘I don’t know when you two became emotionally intelligent, but I kind of want my dumbass friends back’, he says finally. It’s neutral, maybe even mild; maybe just limp.

‘Cheers to that’, says Matsukawa, unoffended, and hands him a mug.

They all sip in silence while Hajime mulls over a succession of options each of which he likes less than the one before.

‘So, you want me to talk to him about it?’, he asks when his mug is half empty and he’s run out of new, somehow ever slightly worse options to add to his mental procession.

‘We want you to kiss and make up, like, yesterday, but this is not about what we want, my dude.’ Hanamaki gestures emphatically with his half-eaten cake. A small shower of crumble pieces comes down over his lap and the sofa, and he puts the cake down with a stricken expression.

‘But like this, you’re obviously both miserable’, Matsukawa takes over, allowing Hanamaki to lick his finger and start picking up as many bits of crumble as possible. ‘So we’re not saying confront him about feelings right now, but I’m sure there’s many other things to talk about that would make… everything… less tense.’

Hajime sighs. ‘The secret boggart research library, for a start.’

Hanamaki briefly interrupts dabbing at his robes to shrug. ‘It’s not really secret. Guess Oikawa’s right, you don’t really come to the club room anymore.’

Very carefully, Hajime puts his mug down on the table. It only clatters the tiniest bit.

‘I sure as hell am coming now.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry guys, i don't think i'll manage a regular bi-weekly update schedule either - a lot of (very good) things are happening in my life rn and i'm very grateful for them, but writing has taken a bit of a back seat. The next (and key) chapter is largely done, but it needs polishing and I want to give it the attention it deserves.
> 
> I hope you liked this one, and I'll try to be back soon with the next :) If you want to chat in the meantime, you can always find me on [tumblr](https://rauchblauwrites.tumblr.com/) too.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [drum_roll.mp3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek56AgxwybI)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my friends, i'm sorry this took so long - i've only made minor changes to two or three key passages since August, but they were Necessary and it turns out sometimes you gotta let things rest to bring them to fruition! Anyway, i hope not all the momentum from this is gone and you'll enjoy it <3

The club room, that much is immediately obvious when Hajime stomps in, was not designed for research. It’s long and narrow, one of a set of four prised from what must once have been an unnecessarily broad corridor. Down one side of it runs a parade of single-glazed Gothic windows, each with a stained-glass inlay of the Hogwarts crest that turns treacherous what little light makes it through – gilded and precious, faded like soft old silk. The other side is taken up largely by a mismatched assortment of rusty lockers, open shelving crammed with boxes full of broom supplies and Quidditch marginalia, and a few wobbly chairs. Any bit of wall space not given over to furniture is plastered with Quidditch posters, game plans, manoeuvre explanations, and, increasingly, Kunimi’s astute little sketches; and the windowsills are cluttered with pots of hardy, non-magical greenery. The first lungful of broom polish, old stone and slightly stale sweat alone slows, soothes Hajime’s momentum.

But the room is definitely not cut out for research. For one thing, the light is objectively awful. So are the chairs, which is why almost no one ever sits on them. The only table is rickety and has two legs that mysteriously resist any and all attempts to charm them the same length as the other two, resulting in a perpetually slanted desktop that things sometimes randomly slide off of.

And yet the table is piled high with books. They’ve spilled out from it, stacked precariously on windowsills and chairs and on the floor, stacked closed and half-open, atop and within each other, with bookmarks and pencils and shreds of parchment, other books, and even an arm guard marking pages. One of them is indeed sobbing – thin, intermittent wails that make Hajime’s hair stand on end. There are notes, too, several abandoned mugs in all states of fill, and at least two different warm jumpers left hanging untidily over chair backs. In the middle of all of this is Oikawa, hunched over on the least terrible chair chewing on a pen, reading a large, battered scroll, and, because the entire universe is conspiring against Hajime today, wearing his glasses.

He doesn’t look up until Hajime is almost standing over him, and then he drops his pen and flinches so hard that the nearest stack of books topples.

‘Iwa-chan’, he says over the thumps of age-softened paper and leather hitting the floor, too loudly and sort of breathless. They stare at each other for a beat, and then Oikawa reaches up and removes a set of foamy yellow earplugs.

‘Maybe one more boggart confession’, he adds sheepishly, at normal volume, setting them carefully down on the table.

The impulse to yell at him is gone. In his baggy jumper and the sparse light trickling in from the window, he looks worn at the edges. On the windowsill beside him, the peace lily is blooming; its white, green-tipped spathes like cranes turning to the sky.

Hajime busies his hands with scooping up the toppled books and re-building the stack, and tries to think of something that could be a response.

‘Sometimes I wish you were capable of doing one or two things, occasionally, by half.’

At the edge of his vision, Oikawa shrugs. A wary smile flickers at the corners of his mouth. ‘I must do as my sweet and supportive nature dictates.’

‘Eccentric and solitary, more like’, Hajime says tiredly, fishing the last book out from under the table and setting it down on top of the stack that immediately slides half an inch down the table until it comes to rest against the upper edge of a notepad. ‘At least let me help.’

The smile solidifies, at that. Oikawa nods towards one of the chairs left empty in the back of the room, by the other place with half-decent sunlight, where they play cards or plot game plans in a tight huddle on the floor. ‘Bring one of those and sit?’

On the way over, Hajime automatically prunes a browned leaf off the pothos snaking around the window furthest from the door. It has two new, glossy leaves. The spider ivy in its hanging basket is producing offshoots like it’s planning to take over the entire room by itself.

‘Who’s been watering them?’, he asks Oikawa, carefully pushing a different stack of books to the side to make space for the additional chair.

‘All of us. There’s a schedule by the door.’

Hajime holds on to the back of his chair a fraction longer than necessary. ‘You make it sound like I haven’t been here in years. It’s been, what. Two weeks, tops?’

‘We’ve been watering them since the beginning of the year.’ Oikawa smiles again, a two-edged thing this time, flitting between sharp and sweet. ‘Kindaichi’s idea. He wanted to take one thing off your plate. Looks like he was right, given that you never even noticed you didn’t have to water them in the first place.’

Hajime grimaces and finally wedges himself around the edge of the table and into the chair. ‘Looks like I owe a bunch of apologies.’

‘Eh, not really.’ Oikawa lifts one shoulder in passing dismissal. ‘We all know that you have a lot to do. But we _would_ like to see your grumpy face in here more often, so do come by when you can.’

‘Yeah. Sorry. I probably left you to deal with stuff way more than usual.’

Oikawa doesn’t contradict him, just leans back in his chair and fiddles with one of the ear plugs. Hajime wonders distantly where he got them. It’s not like mail order from Boots is really an option at Hogwarts.

‘Look, speaking of apologies’, Oikawa says into the awkward pause. ‘I know you told me to back off, so… I’m sorry I didn’t. I just…’ He squeezes the ear plug flat between two fingers, lets it spring back, squeezes it again. ‘No one ever worked with you, right? Even talked to you? No adult sat you down that day, or took you aside after that exam and suggested that perhaps this was something you didn’t have to deal with by yourself? That there was somebody who might be able to _help_?’

The little yellow piece of foam bounces once on the tabletop, and comes to rest.

‘Are you really surprised that the Wizarding World is shit at dealing with mental health stuff?’, Hajime asks cautiously.

‘I’m not surprised’, Oikawa spits, both hands coming down flat, ‘I’m fucking furious! I got all this stuff, at the hospital, counselling and physical therapy, I got _sports rehab_ for _weeks_ , and through all of that they never once stopped to consider _you_. And neither did I. So, I’m sorry, but letting this go was never an option.’

‘Because it makes _you_ feel better’, Hajime counters, a little meanly.

‘Because making it up to you makes me feel better, yes’, Oikawa says. Hard, unwavering. In his tone and in his gaze is something, not an apology but an awareness of what Hajime means and an admission that he has disregarded it, and knowingly. It’s not the first time that Oikawa assumes a permission already denied and leaves Hajime to grant him forgiveness later. It’s honest, at least, and Hajime loves him not in spite of it, but around it, perhaps, with it.

He breathes out and the air softens, just like that.

‘Any other confessions, while we’re at it?’

Oikawa regards him sharply for a moment, then comes forward, rests his elbows on the table. ‘Later, maybe.’

The sobbing book chooses that moment to let out a piercing wail again. It manages to strike a note that makes several of Hajime’s molars hurt.

‘Fuck’, he blurts, immediately distracted and touching his neck where goose bumps have erupted. ‘Which one of these is that?’

Oikawa points his pen to a squat volume bound in red leather, stacked between two black tomes. ‘It does a little better weighted down. Silencing charms don’t work. It positively shrieks when you open it, unfortunately. Seems like the subject matter got to it.’

Craning his neck, Hajime can decipher the title printed on the spine in spidery gold letters: _Spelling Terror_. ‘Fantastic’, he says flatly. ‘Where the hell did you get it?’

‘Noise-cancelling cupboard in the library. And before you ask, I don’t know what spell is on it, and it’s definitely not one we know. Hence, these.’ He indicates the ear plugs.

‘Great. Let’s see that we don’t have to open it today.’

‘I don’t think we will. Actually…’ Oikawa drags out the word, rapidly skimming several paragraphs on his scroll. Apparently satisfied, he lets it roll up with a practised snap of the wrist, and turns a gaze on Hajime that’s so focused it’s almost physical. ‘It’s good that you’re here, because I have a theory.’

‘You do?’, Hajime asks weakly.

‘I do.’ Whatever fuels that gaze sputters out, and it drops down. The sleeves of Oikawa’s jumper are up just below his elbows, half rolled, half pushed, the way he does for work even when it doesn’t get his hands dirty. He tugs at one. Hajime watches the skin of his forearm disappear, inch by inch, under fabric. ‘But I’m not getting any further with it from just reading. I think we might have to test it out.’

‘Oikawa’, Hajime prompts. ‘Spill.’

With one final tug, the sleeve comes fully down, all the way to the wrist.

‘Alright, alright. I started thinking about the Riddikulus charm and how it’s connected to the essence of fear – which is what a boggart is, practically, right?’

The second sleeve comes down, too, and both hands return to rest on the scroll and pen. The question goes out to Hajime, but it’s rhetorical from the way Oikawa is looking not quite at him, but at the air between them, at something in his mind; and the pause he makes is too minute for someone else to fill.

‘Maybe we’ve been overly hung up on that spell. All the textbooks say you have to turn it into something funny, but then they’re written for thirteen-year-old kids. Most of their fears tend to be… simpler.’ He looks at Hajime now, quizzically. ‘Do you remember what form yours took in third grade?’

Hajime pulls a face. ‘That was only a couple of months after you made me watch _The Silence of the Lambs_.’

Oikawa snorts, shoulders curling in, his detached, professional tone shattered. ‘Right. Anthony Hopkins.’

‘Never thought I’d say this, but I kind of want him back now.’

Oikawa opens his mouth, a teasing glint in his eyes, then seems to reconsider and clears his throat. ‘As I was saying. I’m not sure whether laughing at a boggart is the only way to get rid of it.’

At Hajime’s attentive silence, he seems to be picking up steam – it shows in the loosening of his posture, rigidity giving way to the ease with which his bones move in their joints when he’s comfortable and sure. He folds out a wrist, dismissing decades of textbook printing with a flash of blue veins under conifer wool. ‘I’m not even sure it’s the most effective way, though maybe the easiest to do in a pinch. I mean, laughter isn’t even really the absence of fear, isn’t it? There’s hysterical laughter, which can contain quite a lot of real terror, or laughter in the face of fear, but that doesn’t really do away with it. And the fact that you can make Hannibal Lecter faceplant gracelessly into the floor doesn’t mean that when he’s not currently faceplanting, he isn’t still terrifying. Make sense?’

‘So far’, Hajime says, feeling slightly steamrolled. ‘So what are we getting at? What’s the absence of fear?’

‘See, that’s where I’m stuck.’ Oikawa opens his body language wide, elbows and palms moving outward in a shrug that’s twice, then three times his shoulder span. ‘Aggressive happiness? Utter indifference?’

He inclines his head and his voice dips along with it, contemplative. ‘Happiness is connected to despair, an antidote to hopelessness – look at how effective the Patronus charm is, and how difficult to master. Pulling up true happiness in a pinch is much more difficult than pulling up something that’s merely funny. And then there’s the matter of form. Does whatever you do with it need to contradict, or fix, the boggart’s form somehow? Or does it just need to counteract the fear you’re feeling? That’s what a Patronus does – it’s not necessarily connected to the specific kind of hopelessness or despair you’re experiencing. You could be hearing your high-flying career end in front of the entire Wizengamot, and if your happiest memory is of yourself eating a giant slice of very good carrot cake, that would do the trick. I’m not sure if carrot cake will cut it for a boggart that turns into the Chief Warlock telling you you’re being sentenced for corruption and high treason.’

The pause he takes for breath is jarring. It takes Hajime a breath himself to realise that Oikawa is waiting, though he’s not sure what for. Praise; awe; Hajime to catch up?

‘Happy memory’s not your favourite theory, then?’, he ventures.

Oikawa purses his lips, delicately straightening the topmost book on the stack next to his chair with one finger. ‘Ah, it’s more, I know there’s something else that definitely works. Sometimes, at least. Apparently.’

Hajime sets both his hands flat on the table. There’s just about enough space for that. The longest finger on his right is brushing a small stack of parchment; the side of his left palm is coming up against one of the mugs, stone-cold. He’s light-headed with something that refuses to disclose its roots, and at the same time, Oikawa’s sudden lapse into hesitation dredges up an eerie sense of calm that steadies his voice.

‘Tell me.’

For a moment, Oikawa doesn’t move, and then he gets that expression of purposeful openness again. It doesn’t even say _I dare you to ridicule me_ ; he bares his vulnerability in full assurance of its unassailable power.

‘I don’t usually get rid of mine that quickly.’ His tone is even, certain that Hajime will immediately understand what he means. ‘I didn’t cast a non-verbal Riddikulus. As far as I remember, it wasn’t even the proper wand movement.’ He glances briefly down at his fingers on the table, an absent acknowledgement. ‘I didn’t even really care whether it would turn for me. I just didn’t care about it at all.’

Hajime is abruptly aware of every point of contact between his body and something else. The floor. The legs of the chair against his shins, the threadbare velvet of its seat. The wood of its back, slightly curved inward, different wood, grooved and cool, of the table against his forearms, wrists, palms, fingertips. Even the fabric of his clothes, at the knees and neck and shoulders, a seam that lies against the outside of his thigh, a slight draught from the window that comes against the side of his face. His heartbeat, suddenly intrusive, in all the places where his body ends.

Beyond this, there is something else that Oikawa wants him to understand. He grasps at it with some difficulty.

‘Empty mind, you mean?’

Oikawa shakes his head. He’s absorbed in thought, oblivious to the thunder in Hajime’s ears that subsides only reluctantly. ‘No. It’s hard to explain. It was more that my fear was… utterly irrelevant, in that moment. Although’, he adds with a rare chuckle of genuine self-irony, ‘that might of course be because my boggart is pretty silly anyway. So maybe this doesn’t work for… non-selfish fears.’

‘Well’, Hajime says, and when Oikawa’s gaze snaps up he holds it with the same deliberate certainty of shared memory that Oikawa had just displayed. ‘You are a selfish person, after all.’

Oikawa smiles at that, a slow-unfurling thing, dangerous and brand-new. ‘Less so for you, it seems.’

They sit with the table carefully between them. Hajime learns the edge of that smile and the way it fits on Oikawa’s face. Oikawa keeps it on like he knows, lets it soften just before Hajime is done mapping it, just so that he needs to see it again, and returns to his theorising.

‘So, I’m not sure at all whether counteracting fear with happiness will work out, but given that I couldn’t think of an override that would give you a shot at indifference – can _you_?’ His interruption is one of politeness, not a genuine pause. Not really given the space to think, and indeed trusting Oikawa not to need it, Hajime shakes his head no, and Oikawa plunges back into talking.

‘There’s another thing, too. When you go into the theory behind the spell’, he nods at a stack of books to the left that Hajime realises is probably thematic; he recognises several of their spell theory textbooks and the light pink dustjacket of a mind-numbingly technical book he once had to use for an essay on spell construction, ‘there’s nothing that specifies laughter needs to be involved, either. I think it may just be… a bridge of some kind. Something that makes it easier for people to stand up to their fear. Really, what the spell is based on is steadfastness and the conviction that whatever the boggart has turned into is not real. That you can change it.’

This time, the pause is to let his words sink in. His eyes rest on Hajime’s face, not searching or questioning or steadying, just there.

‘So what we get taught Riddikulus wants is strength of mind and laughter. The laughter we may be able to do away with. And strength of mind isn’t usually something you lack, isn’t it?’

Still mutely, Hajime shakes his head no again.

Oikawa nods, as if just now, he has Hajime exactly where he wants him. There is no relief or nervousness as he comes up to the culmination of his speech. His shoulders are loose, his palms up, his fingers still. There is only certainty, and Hajime feels his lungs open in response, letting in longer breaths.

‘Let’s try and find a different bridge then, shall we?’

It’s the tone he has for games, for quick huddles while the other team celebrates a goal, for time-outs called to regroup and rethink and work their way around a problem, whole and unhurried as water. It’s conspiratorial, and so confident of his trust in them that failure becomes unthinkable.

Hajime is programmed to respond, but he also wants to. He’s come to see his problem as something slightly embarrassing but not immediately fixable, or even fix-worthy; and then recently more and more as a nuisance, something unfinished, both in terms of the exams and Oikawa. Now, Oikawa has pulled to the forefront something that is almost curiosity, almost ambition. He goes back over what Oikawa said about happiness, about carrot cakes and corruption.

‘So, a happy memory connected with the fear?’

‘Maybe’, Oikawa muses. ‘Could be worth a try. Though it would have to be a powerful one, probably, and I’m not sure it’s applicable to every kind of fear.’ His tone lightens, quickens into a smirk. ‘Never worry, though, _you_ should have quite enough to choose from.’

‘I thought we were talking about happy memories, not annoying ones’, Hajime retorts automatically.

Oikawa turns up his nose. ‘No need to get all defensive, Iwa-chan. I’m afraid emotional honesty and vulnerability will be key here.’

‘I’m just matching your crap here. You take it seriously, so will I.’

Oikawa softens into a sincerity that’s utterly disarming. ‘I promise I am.’

‘In that case’, Hajime says, never looking away from Oikawa’s face, ‘that does sound doable.’

Oikawa’s eyes are very warm.

‘So’, he says slowly, voice low, ‘what are you going to think of?’

‘You’re very insistent about fishing for compliments today’, Hajime says, equally low.

‘I’m entitled to a few, I think.’

‘Fine’, Hajime relents. ‘How about this, I’ll tell you the winning one when it works.’

Oikawa takes a breath, and another, like he’s swallowing something down in the space between two inhales. ‘Well, then’, he says after the second one, ‘whenever you’re ready, I’ve found another boggart for us to test it.’

The undermost book on the stack closest to him is linen-bound, with a frayed bottom edge that is soft and yielding to the touch. Oikawa straightens when Hajime looks back up, in readiness or in anticipation.

‘Why are you doing this? No, I mean, why right now?’

‘Because I want to’, Oikawa responds. He traces the edge of his notepad with a finger, stops just shy of the top corner, centimetres from the tips of Hajime’s own fingers. He seems to consider that distance, then meets Hajime’s eyes again with a twist to his mouth that’s turned on himself. ‘Academically, yes, but also, I want to get over it, before. And this is how I will.’

Hajime focuses on keeping his own hand very still, and says the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of reassurance. ‘I wasn’t going to kiss you, you know. I wouldn’t do that, so out of the blue.’

Oikawa tenses, blinks. Something inscrutable slips over his face. ‘Aw, Iwa-chan’, he croons, ‘are you a closet romantic?’

‘It’s called consent, asshole’, Hajime says mildly. Watches the aplomb crack and crumble; catches the moment Oikawa decides to let it. Underneath lies the face he wears when he’s figuring something out, the bare remnants of surprise, and a waxing smile.

‘Well’, he says briskly. ‘You could have said.’

‘Not saying was kind of the point.’

Oikawa narrows his eyes. ‘I guess Makki and Mattsun were right. They said I should talk to you, you know. Only you were ahead of me. I hate to say it, but it looks like you win this round.’

‘When? Did they talk to you, I mean?’ It comes out sharper than intended, but Oikawa just looks briefly curious.

‘Just now, after practice.’

Several things fall into place.

‘Those scheming, meddling bastards’, Hajime mutters under his breath, and it sounds more like a compliment than by any rights it should. It’s basically a confession, too, not that _that_ really matters anymore at this point. Except that after not noticing scores of them over the past months, Oikawa now seems to pick up on each greedily, with the same eagerness one accepts something to hold at an awkward social event – a glass, someone’s bag.

On the table, Oikawa folds a single finger around the edge of his notepad. ‘I still want to talk to you about it. I mean, I’ve been gearing myself up to do it all evening, and it’d be a shame to waste all that earnest inspiration. If it’s alright with you, that is.’

Hajime graces that painful oscillation between his usual overly confident front and the uncharacteristic restraint with a swoop into something safe. It buys himself time, too, to measure his breathing.

‘When did you become an expert in consideration?’

‘What can I say, Iwa-chan’, Oikawa spreads his hands, ‘you bring out the best in me.’

‘Well’, Hajime says, hard on the heels of an inhale, ‘if this is turning into a confession, you have to let me go first.’

Oikawa splutters, looking equal amounts of embarrassed and indignant. ‘What? No! Why should I let you go first? I just brought it up, so I get to go first.’

‘Technically, _I_ brought it up, so by your own logic _I_ get to go first’, Hajime points out.

Oikawa huffs, waving away the argument with an impatient snap of the wrist. ‘And anyway, I already know, so really you only have to tell me why you weren’t doing anything about it for weeks, although technically I didn’t really _want_ you to do something about it so it’s probably good that you didn’t, and– we’re doing this all wrong!’

Hajime grins. ‘It’s definitely not like any of the ways I imagined telling you I’m in love with you, no.’

‘Iwa-chan!’, Oikawa wails. ‘I said I wanted to go first!’

Hajime shrugs placidly. ‘I just watched you not taking several good opportunities, how much more slack do you want me to cut you?’

‘All of it, now that I’m your boyfriend!’

‘I still haven’t heard anything about that, and that’s not how it works.’

‘Alright, alright’, Oikawa gripes, ‘I’ll tell you, even though you are being very mean to me from day one and I should definitely reconsider my life choices. Like being in love with my brutish best friend who makes fun of me all the time.’

Whatever he sees on Hajime’s face at that sentence seems to mollify him. Hajime himself isn’t really sure what kind of expression he’s making; it’s like he’s briefly lost feeling in most of the relevant muscles.

‘Anyway’, Oikawa continues, ‘this wasn’t how I was planning it to go. I wanted to present you with a ready-made solution, watch you execute it brilliantly, and then say something grand that would sweep you off your feet.’

‘See, I knew you were still hung up on the damn thing and I didn’t want to say anything until you got over it.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘Why didn’t _you_?’

For a moment, Oikawa looks like he’s going to protest, but then he acquiesces and shrugs, with the gravitas of presenting a conviction that is now void, but still held. ‘I wanted a clean slate. When you think of me, I wanted it to be free from _that_. When you say my name, I wanted it to sound like laughter only.’

Hajime stares at him. It’s a weird talent of Oikawa’s, to say things like that and not sound like a complete dunce. To make them actually have weight. It’s handy for captain speeches, where it’s expected and they have six sets of shoulders to share that weight. Apparently, though, it’s not universally applicable. At the almost comic look of betrayal that flits over Oikawa’s face, Hajime lets out the snort he’s been trying to hold back.

‘Yeah, no’, Oikawa decides, with remarkable dignity considering that he’s bright red up to his hairline, ‘got it. That doesn’t work for the… us.’

‘The _us_?’ Hajime echoes, mockingly, and warm with that old familiarity. But he reaches out and covers Oikawa’s hand with his, brings his tone back to serious. ‘We’re never going to have a _clean slate_ , you know that. And what, like we’re never going to fight either? It’s not that easy.’

Oikawa’s mouth twists in a mask of dismay, but his eyes steady on Hajime’s, bright. ‘So unromantic, Iwa-chan.’

‘Just managing expectations.’ He trails a finger up Oikawa’s wrist.

‘That’s working really well so far’, Oikawa remarks. ‘I’m going to start expecting a kiss any minute now.’

‘Great’, Hajime says and it sounds unexpectedly winded, ‘because I’m going to kiss you now.’

‘No’, Oikawa returns, and there is a heart-stopping fraction of a second before he surges forward and grabs Hajime’s robe to pull him in. ‘This time _I’m_ going first.’

The edge of the table is digging into Hajime’s stomach. In the scramble for balance one of his elbows has landed on a stack of parchment, slowly sliding out to the side with his pulse filling his entire body and Oikawa’s hands an anchor weight on his sternum, all fists and bunched-up fabric, dragging him forward. Only then Oikawa stops short.

With their faces inches apart, Hajime can see every fine line appear and deepen that together make up a scowl.

‘Must you ruin _every_ line?’ Oikawa digs his thumbs into Hajime’s cheeks. ‘Stop smiling. It’s not going to work like that. Iwa-chan, seriously, don’t you know anything about kissing?’

‘Oh my _god_ ’, Hajime says, ‘go first before I do–’

The startling sweetness of Oikawa’s hand cupping his jaw saps all the bite out of the word. Oikawa makes an enquiring little noise. Hajime manages an answering inhale that only shakes a bit. They’ve been this close before, they definitely have, but never like that; never anything like that. It’s impossible to look directly at him, so instead Hajime looks at the place where his cheekbone and the frame of his glasses almost meet, at the delicate shadow there and the way it shifts when Oikawa tilts his head, and then Oikawa’s thumb touches the edge of his mouth and Hajime finds he can’t really look at anything anymore. Their noses brush, very gently, which means that Oikawa must still be looking, or he’s just a whole lot better at navigating kissing than Hajime has previously given him credit for.

Oikawa kisses him like he’s fragile, slow and light, and so impossibly warm that all of Hajime’s breath leaves him in a rush. When Oikawa draws back he chases him, out of some embarrassing reflex, but Oikawa only curls a hand into his collar like Hajime has done a good thing and tugs him in, too, and Hajime goes, blindly. There’s no gentleness about the way their noses touch this time. Oikawa’s amused exhale fans out over Hajime’s cheek. With the hand that’s still on Hajime’s face he corrects the way they fit together, better now, warm and slow still, not unhurried, but deliberate.

Hajime’s pretty sure he needs to be touching him back, only he still sort of needs both elbows on the table, which is after all not quite narrow enough to simply lean across. He settles for just a hand on Oikawa’s upper arm, fingers splayed out, and the newness of that touch makes his head spin, intentional, all five pads of his fingers pressing into fabric softness and the solidity of muscle below. Staying there.

The book makes a hollow noise, a sob ripped from somewhere deep, and Oikawa lets go of Hajime’s collar with something like a snarl.

‘That’s _it_!’

He grabs his wand from the table and whips it so sharply it audibly splits the air. The book vanishes with a final thin howl; the ones previously stacked on top of it drop the few resulting centimetres with several quick, dull thuds. The stack teeters, but holds.

‘Where’d…’ Hajime clears his throat. ‘Where’d you send it to?’

‘The library, of course’, Oikawa says, still annoyed, curt, a little incredulous. He glances at his wand like he isn’t quite sure what to do now that he’s holding it. 

Struggling to keep his tone even, Hajime continues, because now he couldn’t drop this if he tried. ‘If you can just vanish and summon it like that, why did you… bother with the ear plugs?’

Oikawa stares at him. Hajime stops trying to hold in his grin, amusement and affection and sheer relief spilling into that one expression until it feels as full, as absolute and untainted as some remembered childhood happiness. Oikawa lets his head fall into his hands, the tips of his ears reddening, but there’s the kind of tension in his shoulders that means he’s laughing too, wry and soundless.

‘You may have a point about sleeping and eating properly’, he says when he comes back up.

‘Oh, I absolutely do’, Hajime agrees. ‘Which is why we should skip dinner and go look at that new boggart you found.’

Oikawa kisses him again for that, very unceremoniously and kind of wet and somehow still spectacular, and then all but drags him out of the club room and towards the nearest staircase.

‘You know what’, Hajime tells him two floors further down when his nerves are starting to catch up with him, ‘I still want to hear the full product of that earnest inspiration you were talking about.’

At the edge of his vision, Oikawa shakes his head vigorously. ‘Nope, I’m sorry, that was a one-time chance and you blew it.’

But he fishes around for Hajime’s hand, fingers cold, and that helps a little, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if this chapter was a diagram, it would look like ~an ECG~ - i'm sorry for all the painful dilly-dallying and almost-happenings, but Things needed to be Talked About! As usual, i'd love to hear your thoughts <3 You can chat to me here or on [tumblr](https://rauchblauwrites.tumblr.com/).


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